Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
October 7, 2010
25% Shakespeare ABV
While critics have raved about The Comedy of Errors, all of them have observed that “a hefty portion of Shakespeare’s dialogue has been excised,” even remarking that “there isn’t a great deal of the Bard’s actual prose on the Court stage.” So how much Shakespearean verse actually survived, and how much is the invention of the director, Sean Graney? Dramaturg Will Bishop explains:
As a dramaturg, one of the most exciting aspects of working on this show was helping Sean Graney, the director, with his process of adaptation. Sean originally walked into the Court with his driving concept for this piece - directing the show with six actors. He consequently cut down the text to facilitate this, leaving Shakespeare’s language intact, in a cut down form. After this reading, Artistic Director Charlie Newell began to encourage Sean more and more in the direction of full-scale adaptation.
Working with Sean on this, our first step was figuring out the intentions of Shakespeare’s play. The title provided the first clue - this show is supposed to be funny, supposed to be a comedy, and is supposed to contain a lot of errors - people thinking they are in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. This play was written to be a situational comedy, where laughs grow out of ridiculous situations. Our next step was to tease this comedy out of Shakespeare’s text. Sean was devoted to taking this intent and modernizing it, finding the parts of Shakespeare that can stand independently and are clear from the get-go, and digging into the parts which become confusing to reveal their original comic intent.
We walked into our first rehearsal with a text which was about 50% Sean and 50% Shakespeare. The rewritten elements all came directly from Shakespeare’s text. None of the situations were changed or altered, just streamlined and cleared up to facilitate understanding. Every single comedic “error” in Shakespeare’s text carried over into the adaptation.
From the first reading, it was immediately clear that there were long sections of Shakespeare’s text which were working perfectly. Shakespeare’s own jokes about Luce, the fat kitchen maid, were so funny that there was no point in altering them. Shakespeare’s language in the Antipholus-Luciana love scene also worked perfectly, and helped Erik Hellman and Elizabeth Ledo to tap into the emotions of that scene perfectly.
In other sections, however, Shakespeare’s language began to prove an obstacle to the actors. For example, originally, the Courtesan scene included much more of Shakespeare’s dialogue, but, in rehearsal, the cast realized this language began to detract from the hilarity of the situation. We thus changed this language, updated the jokes involved to put the focus on the comedy of the situation. We always looked back to Shakespeare’s original intention, to create a ridiculous situational comedy, and began to transform the text only where it began to oppose this intention.
The play then underwent another process of adaptation through rehearsals, with Sean and his cast continuing to trim down the script and rewrite and modernize jokes, compelled by the simple question of “Is it funny?” Our focus was always on Shakespeare’s intention to create a wacky comedy with a focus on the humor of mistakes. The play which finally emerged, and currently lives onstage at Court, is probably around 25% Shakespeare, 25% Graney, and 50% the product of collaborative rehearsal room adaptation.
But, most telling of all, none of us can tell anymore. When I return to the script, I am, at times, shocked to find jokes which I thought Sean wrote were actually penned by Shakespeare. The script of this play is a beautiful, postmodern jumble of Shakespearian English, faux Shakespearean English, and the words of the contemporary world. Shakespeare’s language is as much our language as ours is Shakespeare’s.
Will Bishop is the Assistant Dramaturg for The Comedy of Errors, and a student in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. The Comedy of Errors runs Wednesday through Sunday until October 17.
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