In the Upcoming 'Shrew,' Love Is for Redder or for Worse

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, September 30, 2007

A billboard-size Vargas pinup. Lipstick-red stage. The aesthetic is drop-dead sexy in the early scenes of the Shakespeare Theatre Company's "The Taming of the Shrew," with an accent on conspicuous consumption.

As set designer Narelle Sissons decides where to place three rolling glass display cases, each as big and swanky as a window at Tiffany's, she says: "It's very exciting. Like having lots of toys to play with."

"I think very visually," says director Rebecca Bayla Taichman. "Everything is born in the design."

As a technical rehearsal inches forward at the Lansburgh, while expensive-looking scenic elements are tested and split-second light and sound cues are fine-tuned, one wonders just where the elaborate palette comes from: Taichman or Sissons?

Sissons, monitoring each change from the back row of the darkened theater, says: "I think it's the play. Our ideas are born out of the text, and in this instance, it seemed right to use the technology."

Taichman calls "Shrew" (now in previews; it opens Thursday) a "complicated emotional story," with intimacies compromised by deal-making. "It seemed familiar to me, this obsession with wealth over real human connection. The play is a steely-eyed, sharp-clawed look at that."

"It's a very tricky play for a young woman to do," she says. "I love the play. It pushes my buttons in all these strange ways -- something about its contradictions, its incredible humor and profound darkness that don't have to cancel each other out. There's nothing about it that's comfortable."

To help her find the right imagery, Taichman called on Sissons, the transplanted Brit who designed her arresting production of Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House" at Woolly Mammoth two years ago. Taichman and Sissons both use terms like "powerful," "high-styled" and "corporate" to describe the opening environment. Even "macho," Sisson says, before taking the word back.

"I don't think this production of Shakespeare's play is anti-male," the designer explains. "It's an interesting debate on male-female social standing. And we have the alpha male and the alpha female coming together working out these issues."

Sissons says the stage's blazing red helps force the heightened performance style that Taichman has in mind. It's pretty rare to apply a color that hot, Sissons says, although she used it in Mabou Mines's recent and unconventional "A Doll's House," in which undersize actors played men dominating tall women. "Not that I specialize in these gender plays," she adds.

"Shrew" is a notoriously thorny "gender play," given its scenes of acidic bickering and controversial obedience. Plot refresher: There are plenty of suitors for the wealthy Baptista's beautiful daughter, Bianca -- but she's off limits until Baptista's elder daughter Kate (played by the formidable actor-playwright Charlayne Woodard) is wed.

Enter Petruchio (the strapping Christopher Innvar, from the STC's "The Beaux' Stratagem" last year), and "Kiss Me, Kate" fans can sing along here: He's "come to wive it wealthily in Padua/If wealthily, then happily in Padua." Dowry in sight, he takes on Kate -- and thus the design focus on this bruising comedy's dark, mercantile heart.

This Petruchio seems to be a bit on the skids, a figure of "faded glory," as Sissons puts it. The milieu grows increasingly scruffy as he hauls his wife home, thanks in part, oddly, to deluxe velour fabric that arrived mere days before previews began last week.

Once in hand, the material was spread out in the parking lot of the STC's scene shop in Maryland, where staffers doused it with dirty water and paint. Then, Sissons says, "we hacked at it with grinders and sanders and left it in the sun. By the time we were done with all that, it looked perfect."

Sissons, who studied in London and moved to New York 17 years ago, began hosting design meetings with Taichman and costume designer Miranda Hoffman last winter in her Manhattan office. (This production has been working slightly ahead of time to make way for the company's two-play Marlowe rep, opening next month at the new Harman Center for the Arts.)

The women were all "Shrew" sophisticates: This is Sissons's third experience with the show since 2000, and Hoffman costumed Taichman's commedia-style production when they were Yale undergrads a decade ago.

For Sissons, revisiting the classics is always a pleasure. "You can always play around and have fun with them," she says. "There's always a new point of view to be found, a new story to be told."

Although the director and designer aren't revealing many of this show's secrets, Taichman says: "It's contemporary, and in a funny way that wasn't even a choice. I felt we had a real shot at getting at where we are now. This could be us."

Sissons is only slightly more specific as she hints at the play's devilish ending, when the men compete to see whose wives are more compliant. "Kate's journey is quite powerful," she says. "By the end of the production the set is collaborating with her coming around. In fact, the whole way through, you could say the set is aiding and abetting the cause -- our cause."

And why place it in Italy? Sissons laughs: "Because it's fun to have a Fellini-style motorcycle with a sidecar."

Funny but serious, since intuitive responses frequently become part of her designs. "I can back it up with intellectual research," she says, "but often it's just that I feel this is going to be the solution to telling the story. And after all, that's what we're trying to do: tell a story."