Stan Salfas' boisterous direction of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW magnifies both the slapstick zaniness and the latent allegory of Shakespeare's comedy of "upward nobility." Setting the play in the sixties - and in the suburbs - Salfas is faithful to Shakespeare's own concern for rising in the world by virtue of the power of one's mouth, and also faithful to Shakespeare's quite intentional identification of sexual rise and fall with the erection of personality and the indelicacies of spending. Salfas has also achieved a remarkable linguistic ease from his actors, translating Renaissance roles into their modern American equivalents, accents and all. Salfas heightens Shakespeare's racy language in a way that shows how the play links its sexual comedy with its comedy of manners, producing in the process a profoundly contemporary view of sexuality as an economy of desire, strictly analogous to the formation of social desire in its literal lust for the good fortune of a proper match.
Perry Meisel
New York University
July, 1981
