The Comedy of Questions

Rodney Gardiner

Some dramaturgies, like Brecht's, offer answers and solutions. And some dramaturgies, like Kent Gash's in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Comedy of Errors, pose questions.

This season's production of Shakespeare's classic comedy in which a series of erroneous assumptions about people's identities are made and then resolved is set during the Harlem Renaissance. Gash's idea was to bring Comedy's theme of disrupted families into relief by using the fallout of American slavery in which families were separated to sate the marketplace. This juxtaposition is problematic: Shakespeare was adapting a Roman play for Elizabethan England. Neither the Romans nor the Elizabethans shared our interest in racial equality, and issues of American identity didn't even exist yet.

New Orleans is the Syracuse to this production's Ephesus. Egeon (Tyrone Wilson) has illegally entered the Harlem port in search of his lost son (Tobie Windham plays both Antipholi). The set is a vibrantly colored impression of 1920s Harlem, and is dominated by a large clock whose moving hands emphasize that Egeon's time is running out. The majority of the cast is black, but the white Mark Murphey does play Gustave the Butler and the Jailer. Designers Jo Winiarski (Scenic), Shawn Duan (Video) and Matt Callahan (Sound) weave cinematic textures throughout, from the montage illustrating Egeon's expository monologue, to the cartoonishly colored slapstick, to the Young Frankensteinian sound cue every time the word "chain" is uttered.

Comedy is more like a cartoon than a historical drama: it relies on slapstick and broadly drawn characterizations meant to delight and entertain, not educate. And therein lies the rub. It doesn't provide a one-on-one correlation for telling the story of the familial disruptions brought about by African-American slavery. An accident of nature tears apart the family in Comedy, and human agency tore apart enslaved American families. All that suggests that Gash's juxtaposition is a bad idea. But the loose dramaturgy is actually this productions strength. It doesn't quite tell the story of the Harlem Renaissance: if it did, Mark Murphey's Irish cop wouldn't have been nearly as friendly to the black denizens. And it's not a rollicking good time: the black Antipholi own and beat the black Dromios (Rodney Gardiner). But historical errors and stomach-turning slapstick inspire questions about how class and race work in America, and that's this production's strength.

So what is the relationship between race and class in 1920s Harlem? And how does that relate to race and class here and now? The dramaturgical holes in OSF's current production of Comedy of Errors ask these questions while intriguingly offering no answers. And they're important questions to ask: race-based classism persistently unravels America's e pluribus unum, and we can't understand how it works now if we don't know about its history. For all the bad rap that directors get for transplanting Shakespeare into different historical milieus, Kent Gash's Comedy of Errors shows how it can work: by posing compelling questions about the historical milieu in which the play is produced.