Shakespeare in the Wild turns an opening-night curveball into a rollicking evening in a former Ross.
There are few places less likely to evoke ancient Ephesus than a vacant Ross Dress for Less wedged between a Staples and a Marshalls.
Yet that’s where Shakespeare in the Wild landed when rain pushed its opening performance of The Comedy of Errors out of deKoevend Park. Audience members carried their folding chairs inside, unpacked picnics and charcuterie boards across the old retail floor and cracked open beers.
As one usher joked, “Instead of Shakespeare in the Wild, tonight it’s Shakespeare in the Ross.”
Despite the change in venue, nobody seemed particularly put out. Music director Abdul Karim Islam, wearing a fez, greeted arrivals with drums, banjo, kazoo and assorted musical silliness onstage. Clowns wandered through the space. Artistic director Leigh Miller eventually bounded out with a triumphant “Season 5, y’all!” that was greeted by an enthusiastic cheer.
That loose, communal spirit suits director Aaron Vega’s production beautifully. His clown take embraces one of Shakespeare’s wackiest premises and keeps throwing physical jokes at it until the whole thing hums.
Even in an unintended venue, it was easy to see why this free summer company has become a Centennial tradition.
A scene from Shakespeare in the Wild’s The Comedy of Errors. | Photo: Shannon Altner
Gags galore in Ephesus
The plot of The Comedy of Errors is famously ridiculous.
Two sets of identical twins — each consisting of an Antipholus and his servant Dromio — were separated as children. One pair arrives in Ephesus, where the other has been living for years. Wives grab the wrong husbands. Servants get slapped for errands they never received. A gold chain causes fresh chaos.
Vega makes all that confusion wonderfully legible by leaning hard into clown logic.
The tone is clear immediately. Steve Wilson’s Duke appears in the opening scene with a tiny baby-doll body. Shanna Sweeney’s Egeon faces an execution contraption whose operators repeatedly gear up to drop the blade, then abort the attempt. Egeon’s long account of the shipwreck becomes a full-ensemble bit involving a ladder, fabric and plenty of pantomimed action.
Bussy Gower and Steve Wilson in Shakespeare in the Wild’s The Comedy of Errors. | Photo: Shannon Altner
From there, it is gags every few seconds. Characters repeatedly whack themselves on the ladder serving as a doorway. Slaps have gleeful Three Stooges artificiality. The cast cheers one city’s name and hisses another, then keeps finding little variations on the joke.
The production can afford that abundance because Vega keeps it moving. One bit misses? Fine. Another is already coming.
Miller and Bussy Gower have terrific chemistry as Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, increasingly baffled by the warm reception they receive from complete strangers. Rachel Darden takes Antipholus of Ephesus in the opposite direction, beginning with cocky, well-connected swagger before crumbling as his entire city appears to turn against him. Mackenzie Beyer’s well-meaning, foppish Dromio of Ephesus is an ideal target for his escalating rage.
Beau Fisher and Leigh Miller in Shakespeare in the Wild’s The Comedy of Errors. | Photo: Shannon Altner
Small cast, big fun
The nine-person cast also turns Shakespeare’s crowded city into a quick-change comedy.
That becomes especially fun in the final scene, when nearly everybody is supposed to appear at once. Dallas Slankard ricochets between the glamorous Courtesan and a much rougher Second Merchant. Shannon Altner makes Luciana’s flirtatious intelligence and Angelo’s gruff New York energy instantly distinct.
Sweeney gets the finale’s most comically exciting assignment, playing both Egeon and the Abbess as they effectively converse with each other. Fellow actors yank costume pieces on and off until Sweeney finally winds up wearing elements of both characters at once. All of these quick-change gags are delightfully ridiculous and executed with impressive precision.
Beau Fisher finds similar pleasure in excess as Adriana, the increasingly frantic wife of Antipholus of Ephesus who cannot understand why her husband suddenly seems to deny their marriage. Fisher swans around with a tiny stuffed dog, unleashes extravagant fits of crying and treats each new marital indignity like a fresh catastrophe.
Islam’s live accompaniment keeps all of this bouncing along. Contemporary musical references pop into the score, scene changes happen within the action and the roughly 75-minute running time flies.
One imagines some of this playing differently beneath the trees at deKoevend Park, where the company normally builds its temporary home each summer. But take away the sunset, the grass and even the park, and Vega’s company can still turn a storefront into Ephesus.
Five seasons in, Shakespeare in the Wild wasn’t about to let a little weather rain on its parade.
A Colorado-based arts reporter originally from Mineola, Texas, who writes about the changing world of theater and culture, with a focus on the financial realities of art production, emerging forms and arts leadership. He’s the Managing Editor of Bucket List Community News, a contributor to Denver Westword and Estes Valley Voice, resident storyteller for the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and co-host of the OnStage Colorado Podcast. A member of the American Association of Theatre Critics, he holds an MBA and an MA in Theatre & Performance Studies from CU Boulder.
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