[In the following review of director Mel Shapiro's production of The Taming of the Shrew for The Public Theater in New York City's Central Park, Isherwood laments that an overemphasis on low humor obscured the underlying complexities of Shakespeare's play.]

Silly accents and silly walks, funny hats and funny shoes, lewd jokes and rude jokes: The Public Theater's production of The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park is pretty hysterical, all right, but that is not meant kindly. As mindless summer movies sprawl across the country spreading either delirium or dismay, depending on one's taste for such as Adam Sandler, the Public Theater has come up with the theatrical alternative: the Bard as reinterpreted by the Three Stooges.

And just as moviegoers flocked to Big Daddy, the Central Park audience at the performance reviewed guffawed right along with Mel Shapiro's shamelessly broad take on the Bard's prototypical battle of the sexes. Let 'em laugh, but someone ought to disabuse them of the idea that what they're watching is actually the play Shakespeare wrote.

Shakespeare was, of course, an aficionado of low humor, and Taming of the Shrew, an early comedy and not among his finest, has more than enough: from the drunken exploits of duped tinker Christopher Sly to wise-cracking servants to the brawling of the central lovers and more than one ribald double entendre. But just as Shakespeare's tragedies are often studded with off-color puns or bits of slapstick, even the broadest of his comedies is laced with complex emotional textures and richly conceived characterizations, all of which Shapiro's Shrew eschews in favor of an attempt at the biggest, baddest jokes possible—with many of them the director's invention. The result, despite some undeniably ripe moments, is eventually an exhausting air of desperation: The cast seems so hysterically intent on finding all the laughs that they end up losing the play.

The production's unpleasantly frenzied aesthetic is embodied in its unfortunate designs. Karl Eigsti's set evokes a standard-issue, subdued Italianate villa that opens onto a nice Central Park vista. But the gaudily colored furnishings that are trundled on and off by stagehands seem to come from an entirely different production dating from an entirely different era. Likewise, Marina Draghici's astonishing mishmash of costumes share only a single characteristic—extreme ugliness. When Jay O. Sanders' Petruchio arrives for his wedding in Hulk Hogan garb, the dismayed reactions don't seem credible—his is hardly the most ludicrous ensemble on the stage (Peter Jacobson's Tranio-as-Lucentio, inexplicably sporting pimp couture and the occasional kilt, takes that title). Certainly the play's layers of artifice can excuse some stylistic disjunctions, but the production's disparate visual vulgarities are more bewildering than pointedly surreal.

Unfortunately, most of the actors turn in performances to match their loud getups. This isn't of any great consequence when it comes to the smaller, less-developed roles, although the endless mugging and less-than-cultivated handling of Shakespeare's language isn't heartening coming from any source.

Mario Cantone has some authentically appealing bits of camp business as Petruchio's servant Grumio. The incomparable Max Wright makes an endearingly bewildered Christopher Sly, cowering in terror when Allison Janney's Katherina comes within striking distance (the production employs additional Sly scenes derived from the disputed Taming of a Shrew text, with Sly observing the play from the sidelines and eventually playing a part or two). Danyon Davis' Biondello is a strangely charming sprite with a high-pitched squeak of a voice.

But Taming of the Shrew rises or falls on the strengths of its principal combatants, the virago Katherina and the putative bully who tames her, Petruchio, and it is here that Shapiro's knockabout directorial style does the most damage. Sanders is a talented actor of some renown, but he is not an inherently commanding presence, and he is lacking in romantic allure in a role that requires heaps of it. His Petruchio is close to a blustering buffoon in the early scenes, a man who seems ill-prepared to match wits and weapons with even the most passive-aggressive of partners.

Janney's Katherina certainly doesn't stint on the physical pyrotechnics, assaulting both her sister and her intended with a gusto that's utterly convincing. But her voluble bellowing and bursts of hysteria come at the expense of a more sympathetically human rendering of a character who hides a real pathos—a soul-starving lack of affection and respect—beneath a veneer of violence. Both performers do not seem to have been given much encouragement to find the coherent characters in the text; like everyone else, they mostly strive to land laughs.

Crucially lacking from both performances is a sense of deep connection with the lover who first appears as a combatant but is ultimately revealed as a soul mate. If we do not feel that Petruchio's brutishness and humiliating trickery serve to inspire Katherina to reveal the real feeling in her heart, a feeling answered in Petruchio's own—well, then, it's just brutishness and humiliation.

Janney intelligently delivers the play's problematic final soliloquy, but with no emotional context surrounding it—no sense that in declaring women's subservience she is primarily declaring her own love and respect for Petruchio—it can only sound uncomfortably antiquated in this equal-opportunity age.

But Shapiro isn't really interested in exploring any of the play's richer possibilities. They're all but buried beneath dubious comic fripperies: a high-stepping chorus of friars singing in Latin while supertitles supply kooky translations, servants got up as pizza chefs flinging dough heavenward. Even, believe it or not, a Viagra joke.