The current production of "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Delacorte Theatre directed by Phyllida Lloyd is a curious one. In her attempt to stand the play's obvious misogyny on it's head and make it relevant for today's audience, she had cast an all female version. Unfortunately, "Shrew" is not as successful as her also all female "Henry VI" set in a women's prison in Scotland. That production had gravitas. Her "Shrew" is a bauble. There is a fine performance by Janet McTeer a Petrucio but for the most part the performances feel thrown off and slight. The best aspect of the production has nothing to do with Shakespeare at all. Lloyd frames the play with a beauty pageant hosted by Donald Trump. Kate and Bianca are contestants, of course. Then, interspersed with the action of the play, are vignettes delivered by a stand-up comic. The humor is sexist but, delivered by a woman dressed as a man, is actually mocking the current climate of sexism and misogyny of Trump's campaign. Unfortunately, during the performance I attended, there were disgruntled audience members who shouted angrily at the comic with cries of "Misogyny!" I guess they didn't get the joke.
"Incognito" at Manhattan Theatre Club is another effort from Nick Payne who wrote the excellent "Constellations." Again he incorporates the physics of time and place into a play, but this time about the brain: memory, loss of, and the actual brain of Einstein. Directed by Doug Hughes, the play asks a lot of questions: Why would a man married for 30 years murder his wife in his sleep? How can a person not remember from one moment to the next? Does the study of a human brain give us an information that we can play forward? The answer to all these questions is simply that we do not know, that we may never know. "Incognito," while thought-provoking and entertaining, doesn't have the focus of "Constellations," a two character play that applied string theory and quantum mechanics to endlessly fragment and refract the story of a relationship. Jack Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson's performances in that play were exquisite and more powerful than those of the current crop, with the exception of Charlie Cox who brilliantly embodies several characters over the course of the play including Henry, an amnesiac who remembers and longs for his wife Margaret but can't remember that he has seen her a moment before. Heather Lind, Morgan Spector and Geneva Carr each slip in an out of various American and British accents effortlessly but I had a hard time keeping track of their various story lines. The play is "brain" food though and I recommend the 85 minutes in the dark.
http://nyti.ms/25fR3U3
