[In the following review of Liz Shipman's 2001 staging of The Taming of the Shrew, Bruckner finds nearly all of Shipman's directorial interpretations beneficial to the drama and approves of the ensemble performance.]

In the Kings County Shakespeare Company's Taming of the Shrew under Liz Shipman's direction, it is the play that is disciplined into civility, with only a slight misstep. Ms. Shipman uses part of Shakespeare's opening scene that is routinely ignored in modern productions. But instead of making the play a stunt by amateur performers to confuse an addled sot, she has a lush reel from the street into the theater where the actors talk him into taking the role of Petruchio. It seems to me this diminishes the distancing effect Shakespeare intended by making Shrew a play within a play.

She also uses fragments from a 1594 play of uncertain authorship called The Taming of a Shrew, but without much changing Shakespeare's text. She makes Katherine a less strident shrew than she is usually portrayed and Petruchio a less hectoring coach of manners. This slight muting does not dull the edge of their verbal combat, but it does make the fumbling rivalry of the three suitors of Bianca and the rascally disorder of the many servants in the play more insistently funny. In this innocent and wild world Kate and Petruchio often seem to be the only adults.

This company has become a fine ensemble. The easy command of Shakespeare's language by the actors is impressive. Every character, right down to the tailor and the haberdasher, has a strong comic personality, so it is with apologies to all that I single out any. But making Baptista a woman, not a man, in this version is inspired since the part goes to Vicki Hirsch, who has wondrous ways of making a character ridiculous but not silly. And giving Joseph Small the part of the widow who is in love with one of Bianca's suitors is no less astute, for much the same reason. As for those suitors, John McCarthy, Phillip Douglas and Jon Fordham make the three of them such lovable provincial oddballs that you are sorry to leave them when the play ends.

Renee Bucciarelli lets one see, and feel, that Kate's eventual surrender to Petruchio is the surest sign of her intelligence—no mean feat of acting. And Michael Oberlander's Petruchio, while he doesn't hesitate to put Kate through some humiliating trials, obviously loves this woman, from first meeting. The play depends on the tone set by these two, and they get it right.