Charles McMahon: Taking Inspiration from Commedia Dell’arte
The Lantern’s Artistic Director on the inspirations for his production of THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company May 16 through June 16, 2024, The Comedy of Errors is directed by Artistic Director Charles McMahon, who has helmed all but one of the Lantern’s annual Shakespeare offerings over the company’s 30-year history. In this essay, McMahon discusses how the traditions of commedia dell’arte influenced the production.
A little over twenty years ago, the renowned Italian commedia dell’arte master Antonio Fava came to Philadelphia to teach a master class. At the time, I was planning a production of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors with a commedia interpretation, so I eagerly signed up to see what I could learn from the great master. For several days at the Ethical Society on Rittenhouse Square, a group of Philadelphia actors, directors, and other artists were drilled in the basics of the traditional stock characters with their exaggerated physicality and the typical scenarios that made up a commedia plot. I won’t say play, because we focused on the most basic and old-school style of commedia performance, which was improvised around a simple idea or scenario rather than scripted. Within the confines of the scenario literally anything goes.
For instance, a wily servant of an old miser is hungry to the point of desperation and must convince the miser to unlock the cupboard so he can eat. One performer specializes in playing the miser, the other the wily servant. Together they make up the action as they go along while taking into account the reactions of the audience and tuning their performances to have the maximum effect on that particular crowd on that particular day.
Fava is not only a great historian of the form, but an utterly inspiring performer. By rigorously hewing to the most ancient and simple forms and rules of commedia, he manages to keep alive its timeless vitality. There is a freedom and freshness in this enforced inventiveness and spontaneity. The focus on the audience releases the actor from the need to think about the character, letting them focus solely on the action. What do I want and how do I get it?
To the basic elements of stock character, stock scenario, outward focus to the audience, and clear storytelling, we must then add the most memorable facet of the commedia performance, the lazzo. The lazzo is difficult to define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, it is unmistakable when you see it. In the modern profession, the lazzi are most often called “gags” or “bits.” They may involve the spoken word (think “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello) but are most often driven by some physical comic idea where some simple action is taken to an extreme that violates the rules of what one normally sees (think Art Carney in The Honeymooners attempting to demonstrate a golf swing).
Fava is a master at taking a simple impulse and finding an ingenious comic form of reality violation where we live in some impossible world for a few moments before snapping back into the “real world” and continuing on with the story. Like the quantum leap of a subatomic particle, the reality violation must be the result of some surge in energy, which when it subsides drops us back into the status quo. The extreme of emotion is the spur to the comic version of the quantum leap. Anger, fear, lust, love, hunger, greed, sadness, sympathy, even confusion — these are some of the many spurs that trigger the lazzi in commedia. The basic DNA of the commedia has remained intact even as scripted playwriting has come to dominate comic performance. It is present throughout Shakespeare’s and Molière’s work, vaudeville, the British music hall, silent film, The Simpsons, and perhaps most impressively in the classic Looney Tunes of the 1930s and 40s.
So, here we are in 2024. The Comedy of Errors was written by Shakespeare over 400 years ago, based on original material from Plautus who died over 2,000 years ago, and our production employs the style of commedia dell’arte, which is some 500 years old. One thing the audiences in ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Tudor England would all have demanded is that the play be fresh, inventive, and most of all funny. In that respect, the most important principle in taking a “traditional” approach is to make certain that the play feels fresh and surprising to the audience in the room. Any attempt to play the piece in some painstakingly recreated “authentic style” will lead to a tired and alienating performance that only an archaeologist could enjoy. Shakespeare’s language is always brilliant and often feels remarkably modern, but some of it — 430 year-old puns about English law, medicine, and labor relations — are intelligible only with the help of extensive footnotes. To make matters worse, after reading a half dozen different annotated editions of any given play, one will find that the footnotes frequently disagree with one another.
Several years ago, some of the Lantern’s favorite collaborators and I created and performed a mock academic lecture purporting to demonstrate the assertion that “jokes always age well, and they are funniest when you explain them.” From this counter-factual premise, our task was to create a performance that was genuinely amusing while gently mocking the academic culture in which most of our audience had been steeping for their entire adult lives. The only way to do so is to find universally funny and timelessly funny things — human folly, human error, human excess — and meticulously demonstrate the absurdity that always arises from these. Much has changed in the world since ancient Rome, the Renaissance, Tudor England. In people, not so much.
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.
