Rancho-On-avon

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

by William Shakespeare

Timeless and all embracing as Shakespeare seems, he sometimes shows himself to be, unmistakably and unattractively, a man of his times. The Merchant of Venice is so bluntly anti-Semitic that most modern directors infuse their staging with irony, distorting the play into a covert dissent against bigotry. Just as problematic is The Taming of the Shrew, which treats women as economic or sexual prizes and delights in detailing how one husband breaks his wife's spirit through starvation, humiliation, irrationality and hints of violence. Most contemporary renditions warp the play into a feminist satire.

Admirably, the star-studded version that opened in New York City's Central Park last week solves the problem in a subtler way: by transposing the action to the Wild West of frontier days. The "Padua" of swinging-door saloons and semicorrupt sheriffs is recognizably not of our era, yet equally recognizably a precursor to it; thus the outrageous sexual politics onstage is not ours, but pertinent to it. Director A.J. Antoon has taken considerable liberties (one character is called Joe Bob), and he uses the setting as much for slapstick buffoonery as for literary insight. But the show, the 14th in producer Joseph Papp's cycle of the Shakespeare canon, works better than any since the opening A Midsummer Night's Dream, also by Antoon, in 1987.

As the spitfire of the title, Tracey Ullman is as funny as on her TV series, but misses the pain of a woman who has spent her life being upstaged by a beautiful younger sister. Morgan Freeman in buckskins looks, and acts, far removed from his role as the prim chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. He finds both the charm and the meanness in his man, speaks beautifully and chortles through the obligatory feminist postlude, when Ullman ends a speech about happy submission by "accidentally" sending him sprawling.

By W.A.H. III