On Stage

...I won't recount the series of confusions caused by the arrival of the merchant Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio in the city of Ephesus where reside, unbeknownst to them, their identically-named twin counterparts (from whom they were separated shortly after birth...

...One major difference between Plautus' Menaechmi and Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is that the former obtained its none-too-subtle effects with one pair of twins, whereas the latter tried to double the confusion on the stage and the laughter in the house by adding a second pair as servants to the first (an underplot suggested by another Plautus comedy familiar to Shakespeare, Amphitruo...

...On the other hand, the trapeze act, executed expertly by one of the citizens of Ephesus (Wendy Parkman), did not seem a bit out of place...

...Not all the stunts are in the most sophisticated taste: I could do without the rubber chicken shot from a cannon and the custard-piein-the-face routine (especially when the face belongs to the Bard—that's merely irreverent, not funny...

...Suffice it to say that the Karamazovs keep the show running— that's the right word for it—in a state of perfectly organized chaos...

...The production now at the Beaumont —directed again by Robert Woodruffmay be said to follow Shakespeare's scenario, but in a zigzag line with "variations" that open the play up to the theatrical contribution of the clown...

...The chief function of the servant-twins is to get beaten up whenever remotely possible...

...the script, with its spoken verses and portentous speeches, is designed to make those occasions appear to be junctures in a real story...

...Since female roles in the early 17th century were still being performed by men, the thread was no doubt a little hard to follow when the man playing Olivia fell in love with the man playing Viola masquerading as a man, only to find out he was really playing a woman in love with Orsino...

...and The Comedy of Errors, which promises to stay not merely alive, but really kicking—and juggling and tumbling and clowning—until the scheduled return of Irwin's show later this summer...

...There have been some good plays, some very bad ones, and a few good plays made bad by pretentious experiments with "avant-garde" stagings...

...Indeed, they manage to juggle all manner of objects while creditably delivering Shakespeare's lines...

...Howard Jay Patterson and Paul Magid the two Antipholuses—or Antipholi, if one prefers...

...In The Comedy of Errors there is no love, and there is poetry only to the extent that a romp can be made poetic...

...Gina Leichman plays her sister Luciana, and together they give a remarkable recital of a Shakespearean speech in the course of a tap-dance number...

...There have been numerous administrations, evanescent troupes, changing directions, conflicting conceptions...

...Shakespeare or no Shakespeare, it is impossible to accept as an unchangeable classic a "comedy" based on the "errors" that inevitably arise when two men look so much alike they cannot be told apart...

...Moreover, the few attempts at "modernization" have generally misfired, although Brooks Atkinson called Rogers and Hart's musical, The Boys from Syracuse, which ran on Broadway shortly before World War II, "an uproarious fantastification of Shakespeare's unactable The Comedy of Errors...

...The next thing you know, the play proper has begun...

...Strangely enough, there is some genuine—albeit rather unconventional— acting amid the antics...

...But The Comedy of Errors is not King Lear...

...Playing the non-Shakespearean role of "The Janitor," he enters with a broom and begins to sweep the empty stage...

...Pausing for a cigarette, he manages to spill, one by one, the whole pack...

...That was Titus Maccius Plautus' intention some 2,200 years ago when he borrowed the plot from a still earlier Greek farce, and it was William Shakespeare's when he picked it up from Plautus, probably after some forgotten minor adapters...

...But Elizabethan audiences were used to that sort of thing...

...Brought in by Adriana to cure her husband's apparent madness, he commands Satan, "by all the saints in heaven," to leave the body of Antipholus...

...Robert Woodruffs direction accomplishes the difficult task of keeping everything in line while maintaining the atmosphere of an unholy mess...

...In fact, I know of no contemporary production where The Comedy of Errors has been performed strictly as written...

...The Flying Karamazov Brothers are, as everyone knows by now, neither brothers nor Karamazovs, and they tend to do more juggling than flying...

...He sweeps the heap of litter he has created into a trap door...

...Then the door suddenly opens and up climbs William Shakespeare (Timothy Daniel Fürst, the silent Karamazov) with a book—his play, naturally—in hand...

...As written by Shakespeare the scene is nothing to get excited about, but at the Beaumont the deft display of puppetry without puppets gives it enormous comic impact, and even an unexpected poetic quality...

...The success of the play hangs less on the written words than on the inventiveness of the actors...

...A few years after The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare wrote a truly beautiful play about twins, Twelfth Night...

...What carries Twelfth Night is not its complex and improbable plot, but its poetic evocation of love triumphant...

...When Dromio —the right one, for a change—protests, Pinch declares both men possessed: "I know it by their pale and deadly looks...

...As we actually see him, Pinch consists of Eisenberg's upper body supported by a tiny pair of lively puppet legs that the hidden Fürst manipulates...

...Sam Williams and Randy Nelson play the two Dromios...

...The most extraordinary moment of the evening, though, comes when Avner Eisenberg teams up with Timothy Daniel Fürst to create a strange character, a schoolmaster and pretender to occult knowlege called "Doctor Pinch...

...Lost for years in the monstrous absurdity of the three-ring circus, the clown is now able to serve Shakespeare, who created many great clownish characters and entire clownish scenes for serious plays, yet could not quite master a fullscale farce...

...Shakespearean fundamentalists and stern stage dieters who don't want their theatrical bread associated with circuses may dislike the joyous affair launched four years ago at Chicago's Goodman Theater by Gregory Mosher (then its artistic director, now the Beaumont's), along with director Robert Woodruff, clown Avner Eisenberg, and the Flying Karamazov Brothers...

...David Gropman's charming sets and the delicious circus-band—which started as the musical wing of the Karamazovs— are happy finishing touches...

...The season just ending, however, may be remembered for marking a happy turning point in this uneven history with the production of two circus-style farces ideally suited to the Repertory: Bill Irwin's The Regard of Flight, a highly enjoyable display of acrobatic jesting...

...They are abetted by Sophie Hayden, who with a twirl of the baton or swing of the machete lends exactly the right nuances to the slightly obscure outbursts of Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus...

...Introducing this vaudeville conception of The Comedy of Errors is a silent prologue performed with comic precision by Avner Eisenberg, a consummate clown in the serious tradition of Grock...

...From its earliest birth—and it has been born more than once—The Comedy of Errors was meant to be a farce, indeed a rather low farce, with no purpose loftier than to make people laugh...

...I happen to fully agree that timeless masterpieces should not be manipulated by fashionable innovators into something stylishly commercial...

...On Stage JUGGLING THE BARD BY LEO SAUVAGE Much has Happened with the Lincoln Center Repertory in the nearly three decades since its promising beginning in the uncommonly well designed, comfortably appointed below-ground temporary structure at New York University in Greenwich Village...

...And the political gags alluding to present-day figures like "Ollie" struck me as intrusive, although they evoked gales of politically revealing laughter...

...when he finally retrieves a cigarette, he cannot light it without spilling a box of kitchen matches...

...He gives it a few shakes and out fall all the cigarettes and matches...

...In that work, though, the twins are brother and sister, and the confusion over their identities is due to cross-dressing...

...The company's permanent home, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, has undergone several remodelings and too often been dark...