A Comedy With a Few Errors

It is once again that time of year when Cedar City and Southern Utah University join in presenting the Utah Shakespeare Festival.  I have been privileged to be able to attend the past several years, and have always thoroughly enjoyed each presentation and play I have attended.  This year, I was able to watch the company’s production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.

This play tells the story of two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, which end up in the same town.  The humor of the play comes from the many miscommunications and misunderstandings that occur as not even those closest to the four men can tell them apart from their identical counterparts.  In an interesting twists on the story, this version of the play set in the story in a western background.  While I enjoyed this unusual setting, there was a bit of a mismatch to the storyline, since the original play takes place in a seaside city, and numerous references are made to sailing and ships.  Aside from that, however, I found the approach to this story worked rather well.

For the most part, the acting was superb.  The two actors playing the bondsmen, both named Dromio, quite often stole the show.  They had fantastic comedic timing, and were well-suited for the more physical aspects of their parts.  The two main actors playing the parts of the other set of twins, Antipholus by name, were also quite good, requiring only a slight suspension of disbelief in order to buy into their supposed identical looks.  However, the two main female parts were not as strong.  For the first half of the play it was very difficult to hear, much less understand, the lines spoken by the actress playing Adriana, the wife of one of the Antipholus twins.  The second half of the play was slightly better, but she was still difficult to understand.  The major female part, Luciana (Adriana’s sister) was easy to understand, but her acting was slightly stilted, like she was reading her lines rather than speaking them.  The only other issue, for the majority of the characters, was the fact that they were delivering their lines, still using the Shakespearean English, hard enough to understand in the best of circumstances, but overlaid with false , southern/western accents, which added to the difficulty in understanding everything that was said.

Overall, the play was very enjoyable.  There were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and at least one scene I laughed until I cried (even the actor playing Antipholus was having difficulty keeping a straight face).  True, there were some issues with the play and its presentation, but I would have no problem recommending this production to someone looking for a fun, enjoyable evening.  I would only recommend they look up a summary of the play beforehand, so that some of those issues previously discussed would not distract from their enjoyment.