In "Hamlet," a subplay called "The Murder of Gonzago" is amended by the title character for his own uses. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," guildsmen put on a fractured, amateurish "Pyramus and Thisbe," hilarious and yet ultimately means for Shakespeare to eulogize the art of the theater—no matter how humble the practitioners.
All that is a clue to "The Comedy of Errors," a new Chicago Shakespeare Theater production that enacts the original comedy but sets it inside a frame story involving British filmmakers shooting a cinematic version during the Blitz in 1940. We see this "Comedy of Errors" as the moviemakers enact it for the camera.
"It's about what people have to do in order to create," explains Barbara Gaines, who came up with the idea and is directing the production opening Wednesday at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. "It's about getting the artistic job done and the huge effort it takes."
"There are a number of reasons 'Comedy of Errors' lends itself to this," says Ron West, author of the terrific comic version of "Romeo and Juliet" at Chicago Shakespeare a few years back and now this new frame material. " 'Comedy' is shorter than most of his plays, so there's a little more room to play around with. And the idea of a frame wasn't alien to Shakespeare, who put one in 'The Taming of the Shrew.'
Full of slapstick
"I guess the main idea was to find a lot of intersections between my characters and those in the original," West adds."Comedy of Errors" is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, rife with slapstick and farce. Its brevity and blunt humor have lent it to all sorts of adaptive treatments, from the Rodgers and Hart musical "The Boys From Syracuse" to the version starring the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric.
Gaines says she was standing in the back of the troupe's earlier home, the Ruth Page Theater, some years ago when the thought struck her that a studio soundstage was perfect locale for a Shakespearean adaptation. It was a setting familiar to Gaines most of her life.
"My grandfather was a producer in New York, and my father was a TV director," she says. "I was allowed to go on the set after I turned 10, and I'd help my dad in the summers, serving as script girl and in other jobs."
The idea germinated until around the time West wrote and performed in his "The Second City's Romeo and Juliet Musical: The People vs. Friar Laurence, The Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet." He was at work on a musical "King Lear" when Gaines approached and suggested "Comedy."
"He's a brilliant, outrageously funny man," Gaines says.
"I live in California, I'm 6-foot-2, I like surfing and mountain climbing and I'm 48," he says quickly and pseudo-mechanically when asked about himself.
Separate story
"We still put on the actual 'Comedy of Errors,' " West says. But there's a separate story built around the 1940 Shepperton Studios film community, which bands together to make the movie to buoy the spirits of the troops and beleaguered Britain.West's characters include Dudley, the movie's director; his wife, Veronica, a star in the film, who's having an affair with her co-star, Emerson; Brian, a veteran Shakespearean demoted to a smaller part to make room for Phil, an American crooner and pop star brought in to boost box office.
Then there's Eddie Philpot, a vaudevillian famous for an act employing the sound of his own flatulence.
Composite characters
These 20th Century characters are composites evoking various real figures. Brian is a combination Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, for instance, while Phil is a mix of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable. Philpot is an actual French comedian and the stuff of West's own groundling-brushed imagination.We watch them make the movie, the producer included, taking roles in the actual "Comedy of Errors." Shakespeare's farce, set in antiquity, tells of two pairs of twins, separated for many years, but winding up unknowingly in the same locale at the start of the play, each brother repeatedly mistaken for his sibling by everybody throughout the story.
The play-within-a-play enables the commingling of farce and tragedy. The British filmmakers go about their jobs as bombs explode, bits of scenery sometimes crashing around them. West even slyly works in the renowned St. Crispin Day's speech from "Henry V," a nod to Olivier's 1945 movie.
'Artists create'
Gaines sees a metaphor not that dissimilar from Shakespeare's "Pyramus" in "Midsummer." "Artists create no matter where they are, whether in jail or when they're sick," she says. "Sure, the story these filmmakers are putting on is silly, but they believe it will help their country, that it will make people laugh in a time of crisis. It also underscores that even 'Comedy of Errors' itself deals with loss, abandonment and reunion."Communal bonding laces this production. The cast includes players who've worked in Chicago theater for a long time, often for Chicago Shakespeare: Timothy Edward Kane (Antipholus of Syracuse/Emerson); Sean Allan Krill (Antipholus of Ephesus/Phil); Ross Lehman (Dromio of Syracuse/Dudley); Kevin Gudahl (Dromio of Ephesus/Brian). Dale Benson, Paula Scrofano, Roger Mueller and Greg Vinkler are among other veterans.
"These are old friends, and a lot of them have worked together for 20 years," notes Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare's artistic director. "The theater is like war. You're constantly at war with time. Technical rehearsal arrives whether you're ready or not. Opening night arrives whether you're ready. Closing arrives whether you're ready. We may not have Nazis bombing, but there are things all of us have to deal with, pain you have to put aside to come together for this one effort.
"Theater artists make tremendous sacrifices, and there's a generosity of spirit unrivaled by anyone anywhere," she believes.
West, who began acting with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland and performed on "3rd Rock from the Sun" and "Malcolm in the Middle," puts it more prosaically.
"I sort of work backward," he says to explain how he fashioned all the interactions between art and life that take place in the plot. "I just try to have fun with it, and nobody has more fun than I do."
sismith@tribune.com
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