Summary 
Set within a sun-baked Italian courtyard, a fast-paced and entertaining farce with a quartet of "bumbelini" serving as a Keystone-Kops chorus. Strong comic performances but bordering on the over-produced for such a slight and far from poetic play.
Design
Directed by David H. Bell. Set by Dex Edwards. Costumes by Susan Mickey. Lights by Diane Ferry Williams. Sound by Robert Neuhaus. Original songs and music by Henry Marsh.
Cast
Sean Fortunato (Duke), Tom Mula (Egeon), Kathy Taylor (Abbess), Timothy James Gregory (Antipholus of Syracuse), Tim Decker (Antipholus of Ephesus), Lisa Dodson (Adriana), Laura Lamson (Luciana), Kraig Swartz (Dromio of Syracuse), James Fitzgerald (Dromio of Ephesus), Andrea Solloum (Luce), Carole Gutierrez (Courtesan), Neil Friedman (Balthasar), Brad Armacost (Angelo), Darren Bochat (Bumbelini), Michael Goldberg (Bumbelini), Eli Goodman (Bumbelini), Vincenzo Ingurgio (Bumbelini).
Analysis
David H. Bell, a veteran of Chicago musical-comedy theatre, directs Shakespeare Repertory's The Comedy of Errors as a frenzied physical farce. Bell sets the play within a spacious Mediterranean courtyard, replete with upstage marble arches, climbing vines, and white-wire deck chairs scattered downstage. The open staging is lit with a profusion of bright yellows that results in a colorfully sun-baked Italian appearance.
The initial mood, established by onstage wait-staff, is one of sweltering Mediterranean ennui, as a quartet of sluggish waiters smoke cigarettes while half-heartedly sweeping a seaside plaza. The sounds of nearby surf and seagulls accent their boredom as the audience takes their seats. The ennui suddenly and permanently changes, however, as the production begins, and the four waiters become the omnipresent choric "bumbelini" that provide ample visual humor while speeding the pace.
The bumbelini, wearing black bowlers and black vests over white T-shirts, launch into Marx Brothers-style action and prepare the stage by snapping linens and dressing tables. They set the tables in a dizzying flurry of quickly tossed - at times with precise no-look throws - cups, saucers, and plates. The bumbelini also portray the police officers who shout mock-Italian idiocy and scurry across stage during the Keystone Kops-style second-act chase scenes. On opening night, their raucous first-act soccer game culminates with a kicked ball sailing into the audience. In the spirit of this show, a nimble bumbelini flies into the seats in pursuit of the bouncing soccer-ball and, in gratitude, playfully kisses the top of the head of an assisting audience member before returning in triumph to the stage.
To Bell's credit, these entertaining bumbelini (at times acting as footstools and at one point launching a barrage of oranges into mid-air) do not upstage or overwhelm the fury and flurry of the multiple-twin plot mechanics. Instead, they accentuate the antics of the Dromios and Antipholi.
In the romantic leads, Timothy James Gregory portrays the visiting Antipholus of Syracuse with bewildered courage and awestruck helplessness over Luciana, while the darker Tim Decker imbues Antipholus of Ephesus with a frustration that seethes with anger, as evidenced when he drags a police officer - who is supposed to be leading him away - across the stage by his manacled wrist.
Bell provides the play's quadruple leads with their own slew of physical comedy routines. Gregory's initial 1.2 encounter with the "wrong" Dromio explodes into a frantic "duel" with wobbling bread loaves, and the beleaguered Syracusan fends off an onslaught with an oversized fish. Later, when Gregory clambers out of Luciana's bedchamber and hangs by his hands from the gallery, his trousers fall around his ankles as he dangles over the stage. Near the finale, in yet another moment of desperation and fear, he and "his" Dromio use crossed silverware to ward off the supposedly vampiric Courtesan.
Similarly, Decker's barbershop quartet serenade of Adriana in 3.1, with the "wrong" Dromio popping out of numerous windows to rebuff him, veers into slapstick. Decker and his quartet of Ephesians use and abuse the other Dromio alternately as a stepladder and a battering ram, both in violently failed attempts to enter Adriana's gate. Later, in his attempt to conceal himself from pursuing police-bumbelini, Decker hides behind a flowerpot then disguises himself as a cocktail table, complete with table-cloth. Unwitting waiters pull up chairs to him to observe the commotion, and his sneezes and sudden motions petrify then panic the bumbelini.
The punching-bag Dromios endure Three Stooges-style slaps and pokes as well as towel-snaps to the groin, a beating with a Bible, and a non-stop assault of verbal abuse. Frequently sent rushing off on some errand or another - for rope, for gold, to arrange transport - at one point in the second act they rush past each other at center stage, and both pause in fleeting wonderment before continuing. Some of their humor descends below the low-brow, such as a 2.2.199 need for relief ("I long for grass") becoming - in a reference fitting of the speed and atmosphere of the production - a hankering for marijuana, or flatulence jokes ("words are but wind") during the 3.1 battering ram sequence. At the production's conclusion, the two Dromios decide to mark one of them with a large white "X" so the Antipholi can tell them apart.
Bell's inventiveness is evident from the 1.1 opening sequence, with a puppet-show version of Egeon's shipwreck story. The tale is told with seafaring sound effects and a detailed visual sense, especially when the tiny ship is "splitted in the midst." The play's breakneck pace and manic mood falters only during the single intermission, but the sophisticated and soaring original score, reminiscent of the Titanic film music, is well worth this brief lapse.
In supporting roles, Luciana is presented as a quick-to-panic, high-pitched and love-starved airhead who becomes so flustered at times she is incapable of speech. Her sister Adriana is played as highly-charged and over-sexed. Her 2.2 summons of the "wrong" Antipholus to supper becomes a seductive table-dance ("thou art an elm . . . I a vine") that culminates with a stunned Gregory dropping his dinner rolls and stepping into a metal bucket. And the ever-strange schoolmaster Pinch gets a laugh when he crosses the sun-baked stage barefoot in a grimacing half dance while whispering "hot, hot, hot."
The complicated mechanics and split-second timing of Bell's light-hearted but hard-working - even overwhelming - production, while a little forced during opening night, smoothed and quickened with repetition, and by mid-run this show sang with the rapid-fire physicality its director intended.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.16, No.3, Summer 1998.