[In the following review of the Aquila Theater Company's 2000 staging of The Comedy of Errors, originally published on July 14, 2000, Bruckner claims that Robert Richmond's adaptation not only updates the original text, but actually saves it.]

Whatever would Shakespeare have done without shipwrecks? So many of his plots turn on them that when a character in any play asks where someone is, I half expect the reply to be, “Lost at sea.” Well, life was tough in the old days if you lived on an island, I suppose. It was tougher on theater audiences; since staging a sinking was not possible, people had to sit through long descriptions of storms, broken masts and screams in the wind. None is more tortuous than old Egeon's speech at the opening of The Comedy of Errors—so filled with incident that it induces amnesia, but if you forget any detail, parts of the rest of the play make no sense.

No one who sees the rousing production by the excellent Aquila Theater Company will forget a whit of it. It replaces all the lines of the first scene with another Shakespeare device, a dumb show—the smartest dumb show I have ever seen. Under what might be a trio of giant umbrellas or dirigibles with bright satin streamers falling to earth, a kind of balloon gondola serves as a bouncing boat for Egeon and his wife, Emilia. And they, with four puppets and the help of a few disembodied hands, make the births of their identical twin sons, Egeon's purchase of two more identical twin babies to be the sons' servants and the scattering of the family in a tempest as vivid, funny and slightly cruel as a Saturday morning cartoon.

As confusion of identities increases in the play, Shakespeare has some characters complain that Ephesus, the setting, must be enchanted—an awkward way to let the playwright introduce some funny business that didn't fit his plot. The Aquila's Ephesus is enchanted a levantine maze in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire where the merchants are as silky as their shirts and the soubrettes are belly dancers in billowing damask trousers. In this place anything can happen.

Robert Richmond, the associate artistic director of Aquila, who directs here, emphasizes speed and very broad interpretations of character. As a result, the endless twists of this plot keep the audience laughing for two hours and viewers can see through every one of the sometimes murky puzzlements that so delighted Elizabethans.

David Caron's realization of the two Antipholuses is very clever: the one a bit slow, self-satisfied and vapid, and the other so sharp and hot-tempered he is a menace to himself. Other people may be confused about which is which, but we know. Those twins, however, are almost blown away by Louis Butelli's twin Dromios. Mr. Butelli, who has the timing and precision of a dancer, might be made of rubber. These Dromios know every trick in the long stage history of rascally servants, and they are startlingly sinuous; sometimes other characters encountering them look like people trying to discipline octopuses.

(A glance at the program will tell you these four roles are taken by two different Carons and two Butellis. They are not; one Caron plays both Antipholuses and one Butelli both Dromios. In fact, the company has even made up a couple of fixed photographs of the two ringers, on display in the lobby with the rest of the cast, complete with fake biographies. What is the point of this exercise? It is one thing for characters in a play to fool the audience; it is quite another for the actors to pull something like this.)

If Lisa Carter makes Adriana less shrewish than Shakespeare suggests, she also makes her much more comically gullible. Mira Kingsley's Luciana is a perfect foil for this Adriana, never to better effect than when her primness is melted by the passion of the Antipholus she thinks is Adriana's husband. And if Marci Adilman's Emilia is only a mime in the shipwreck scene, she is hilariously imposing and voluble in the guise of the Abbess at the end. (And in between she gets to be a Nell, who really is, as one Dromio says, a sphere.)

Alex Webb combines the various merchants of the play into a kind of mafioso whose threats of assault with a tiny battery-operated fan should not be allowed to be as hilarious as they are, and he turns Shakespeare's magical schoolmaster Pinch into a lunatic Merlin worthy of Monty Python at its best. And William Kwapy as the Duke is so wily and smooth it is obvious that no mystery, or Ottoman intrigue, could possibly trip him up; when he frees Egeon from the death sentence, he even makes you smile at your suspicion that he regrets not being able to kill him.

Mr. Richmond calls this production an adaptation. It is better than that formula suggests—a very thoughtful updating that saves the text instead of changing it. The company uses music, dance and routines borrowed from film and television to give us the action in the idiom of current popular entertainment, but its fidelity to the play's language brings Shakespeare's idiom much closer than a traditional performance of this possibly could. If it sometimes goes over the top—a lightning-fast sequence involving one Dromio, a prostitute, a snake and a sleeping Turk is slapstick triumphant—well, Shakespeare's customers presumably thought they too would get a few laughs for the shillings and pence they shelled out.

This company, the first mixed British and American troupe approved by Actors Equity to perform in New York, has been deservedly praised here and in Britain for its ingenious productions of ancient plays. But in many ways its intensely amusing and perfectly comprehensible Comedy of Errors lets one see what an extraordinarily inventive and disciplined outfit it is.