Artist Interview: Cast Members from THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Hear from the central mixed-up quartet about balancing the comedy, the text, and the heart of the play
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: two sets of identical twins walk into an Ephesian market —
That’s the set up for the many punchlines of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, onstage May 16 through June 16, 2024, at Lantern Theater Company. In this dizzyingly funny romp full of wordplay, visual gags, and pool noodle fights, the clowns in the cast race through complicated plot twists and myriad comedic bits to reach a well-earned and well-loved reunion between the long-lost brothers at its core. We caught up with a some members of the cast to talk about the hard work it takes to make a light comedy. (Haven’t seen the play yet? You might consider bookmarking this interview to read later to avoid spoiling some comedic surprises and minor plot points.)
MEGHAN WINCH (Lantern Resident Dramaturg): What does it take to balance the comedy in the text, the physical and topical comedy that’s above the text, and the complicated plot? How do you keep all of those things aloft?
J HERNANDEZ (Dromio of Syracuse): I can preface this by a conversation that I had with Charles [McMahon, the director] even before we started this process. I told him, “Look, man, I’m not the strongest clown in the world. There’s some things I can handle and there’s some things that take me a little bit more work than your other clowns that you work with. But the one thing that I can do for you is that I can handle the text.” That’s the one thing that I think I can always find some type of consistency in. And that’s one thing I think, as a unit and as an ensemble, we have been able to help each other out with.
Having Dave [Johnson, Antipholus of Syracuse] on stage is just a godsend because I take his cue on a lot of stuff. There are things in the text that I’m like, “Okay, I, I think I can handle this.” But then there are things when it comes to clowning, where having Dave just there to anchor me in that, I feel just so safe and so taken care of. And just as far as just the amount of support that I get from Dave and hopefully that I give to him, it’s good in that it almost just — I won’t say “naturally,” because I think it’s a glib way to put it, but I think there is something about just relying on the ensemble, for all of us just to be able to work together and to try and find that balance with each other.
ZACH VALDEZ (Dromio of Ephesus): Yeah. I remember the last few days before we started previews, Dave really encouraged trusting the text too. The first few days were very much about inventing comedy bits, but I really appreciated the encouragement of just trusting what was going on in the text. So, finding the comedy was definitely tricky, but it was nice to also trust the story and the encouragement to trust the story.
DAVE JOHNSON (Antipholus of Syracuse): I can remember one thing that seemed really helpful just as we were in previews and right before opening was a lot of the comedy in this is in the reacting. I’m constantly asking someone a question about a scene that happened previously, but it’s not the person I was actually talking to [because of the mistaken identities]. So this play I feel like has more unanswered questions and lists than I’m used to in any Shakespeare. J must have a million lists. It’s bizarre. I didn’t realize it until we were really up and running. I was like, “My God, he just comes on with like a laundry list of balsamums and aqua vitaes.”
J HERNANDEZ: And all in this really weird, arcane Dromio language that only he understands!
MATTEO SCAMMELL (Antipholus of Ephesus): The bits and ad-libs were the easy part. They all came out of what we were attempting to cultivate during the rehearsal process, which was a sense of play — always searching for ways to create little games, lazzi, references to popular culture, trying to make each other laugh, keeping it fun. What ended up becoming part of the production were things that both helped tell the story and were funny/entertaining enough to warrant their stay. More often than not, a comedic idea emerges from understanding the circumstances. Additionally, it’s usually funnier if it’s connected to the plot. I’ve heard that comedy is just tragedy minus dignity. So, if I can lose myself in the tragedy of my characters situation and let the dignity fall out, I’m 80% of the way towards telling a comedic story.
MEGHAN WINCH: Alongside all this beautiful text work, you’ve also built a lot of showpiece comedy bits. What was the most challenging to work out and which is the most fun to do?
ZACH VALDEZ: I think the challenging part for me was letting myself be in the reality where doors come off the hinges and then go downstage, and just allowing the reality to be a world where you can bend the rules…I got in my head about that. But the fun things is, I think, to be a spectator — whenever you’re on stage with everybody and just seeing them do their thing and being in that flow.
DAVE JOHNSON: I feel like this play really builds to the joke, and that was really hard because you want those laughs early so that you know it’s a comedy.
MATTEO SCAMMELL: During rehearsals, absolutely and without question the door bit was the hardest to work out. There must have been 20 drafts of the scene, always coming up with bits that would be funny for one day and then the next they wouldn’t work somehow, as if born out of the purity of the moment.
My favorite bit is the gangster fight with Dave’s character. I love my gangster character. He has a stupid, funny voice; we do a hilarious bit with the hammer; I get a nice big laugh on a joke I sort of came up with and it’s all really rewarding.
J HERNANDEZ: I think one scene that I find to be just so fun is the Courtezan scene between me, Dave, and Lee [Minora]. Just speaking as someone who’s in the backseat the entire scene, it’s been funny in every single iteration to me. That one has always been a lot of fun — just how extremely wacky it is, yet it provides so much information.
MEGHAN WINCH: How did the show change when you put it in front of an audience? What did you learn?
MATTEO SCAMMELL: You learn everything in front of an audience. You learn what works and what doesn’t. Especially in comedy, you learn timing: set-up, punchline. As someone who hasn’t ever done slapstick comedy, the audience helps guide you towards the natural pace of a joke and thereby the show. A big lesson I learned was in silence. There is so much value in silence — a moment for the audience to take in the ridiculousness of the situation. Every performance is another lesson in timing and pace.
MEGHAN WINCH: We’ve got two pairs of long-lost twins, and while you interact across twins, the brothers never interact until the last scene. What sort of work did you all do to thread together your twin pairs?
J HERNANDEZ: I would say that because Zach and I have so little stage time together all during the show, really the only thing that we could do as far as imitating or mimicking each other is the mirroring of entrances as far as just running in, running out — things that we could just do very easily and at the same time, the audience would be able to pick it up easy enough.
DAVE JOHNSON: Yeah. There was not, I think, one moment that we worked on it pointedly. There was no moment where it’s like, “All right, we’re just going to call the twins in and we’re going to mirror each other.” I felt like we just needed to come in with this text and a head full of ideas. That was kind of nice, to watch some of these other scenes that Matteo was in and see what was going on, see what was working for him, and kind of adopt it later, to wait until we both had a character figured out and find that was a shorter distance than coming in and being like, “We’re going to walk like this. We’re going to use this gesture.” It was just sort of like, “Oh, we’re actually both already doing that. Fantastic.” And it’s the kind of twinning that I think happens when you’re in a process anyway, because everybody’s just like in a little vacuum.
MEGHAN WINCH: When you finally do get to this reunion, the Antipholi have a very funny mirroring beat, and then the Dromios’ reunion is surprisingly touching in this very silly show. Can you talk about building those moments?
MATTEO SCAMMELL: The Antipholi encounter at the end was a joint effort. Early on, we were doing hand games that only we would know (vis-a-vis the long handshake in the movie Big with Tom Hanks). We tried improvising and mirroring each other for as long as we could until Kishia’s character [Kishia Nixon, playing Adriana] would stop us. We would just try to make each other laugh.
DAVE JOHNSON: Matteo and I were playing with our bit from the first time we were on our feet. It just sort of seemed like we wanted to play in that world — that we were going to come out and take all of this kind of pent-up rage and things that we’ve been exploring with that character and really just be absolutely silly. So, I feel like that kind of physical expression was something we were both interested in from the beginning, and we didn’t know if it was going be an elaborate handshake or something verbal or physical, and it ended up kind of being all of those things.
ZACH VALDEZ: I liked Rock, Paper, Scissors.
DAVE JOHNSON: Oh, right. There was Rock Paper Scissors for a while, and it was a tie every time.
J HERNANDEZ: Me and Zach’s reunion went through a couple of iterations, and really that moment at the end of the show since was just something that we found through exploration. It was something that was instinctual as well because the reunion of the Antipholi is just so huge. It’s just really big and it’s really freaking funny. There’s absolutely no topping that whatsoever. Like, you can try whatever it is that you want. There is absolutely no topping the grandeur of how big those expressions are and how funny they are. And you think about any type of comedy that you see, especially comedies that just came out in the 1970s and 80s, they really do tug on the old heartstrings as well. Ending on that hug, I think because it is something that would happen and it’s something that I have seen happen in real life — that “Oh my God, you’re related to me. Come here. I just want to hug you right now.”
ZACH VALDEZ: That’s a great moment where you kind of just trust the script, because it’s actually a really sweet little tiny scene. It’s nice that there was such a great moment with the Antipholi that it gives us room to have an intimate moment.
DAVE JOHNSON: When the music comes up over them, talking and laughing, it’s like the end of a movie. I almost want credits to roll. I was like, “It’s beautiful. No notes, I’m not touching that.”
MEGHAN WINCH: Yeah. It’s such a beautiful exhale.
J HERNANDEZ: You want to know what it was before?
MEGHAN WINCH: Yeah!
DAVE JOHNSON: Sure!
J HERNANDEZ: It was a false handshake. It was Dromio of Ephesus saying “Let’s go hand in hand as brothers.” And I go in for the handshake and I go, “Heyo!” and just totally dog them and run inside the house.
DAVE JOHNSON: That’s great.
MEGHAN WINCH: That’s funny! I do love where we ended up, though.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is onstage May 16 through June 16, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
