THE SHREW
adapted by Montgomery Sutton from “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare
Coming in 2018.
This new adaptation reinvests in and expands Shakespeare’s often-omitted framing device that opens the play, where a drunk, troublemaking misogynist named Christopher Sly is deluded into believing he is a Lord and that a young barback in drag is his loving wife, before a company of traveling players put on a performance for him of what we think of as The Taming of the Shrew. Here, that acting company is all-female; the person leading Sly’s delusion is the Hostess owning the bar; and Sly himself is made to play Kate the Shrew, resulting in a gender-swapped company of players, inherently meta-theatrical farce, and an increasingly blurred line between reality and fiction as Sly experiences the world through Kate’s eyes, begging the question: who is “the Shrew”?
History
On February 19th, Seven Stages Shakespeare Company presented a ShakesBEERience developmental workshop of The Shrew at Portsmouth Book & Bar. Check out this review from Seacoast Weekly that called it “energetic and entertaining, and all the more fascinating for its setting and intimacy.”