Exile's return

Andrei Serban seeks the miraculous in ART's Shrew

by Scott T. Cummings

Andrei Serban defines his life as one of perpetual exile. "I have been exiled so many times from so many places," says the renowned international director. "And I keep being exiled -- either self-exiled or thrown out. That's how it is for me, and I'm used to it."

Serban is speaking from the basement of a Catholic church in Cambridgeport where he is rehearsing William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, which opens at the American Repertory Theatre this week. Serban's theater work and aesthetic constitute one of the cornerstones of the ART repertoire. In the 1980s, he directed almost once a year for Robert Brustein's company, including memorable renderings of The Three Sisters, Sganarelle, Twelfth Night, and the ART signature production The King Stag. The Taming of the Shrew is his first production here in nine years, which makes it something of a homecoming, a return from exile, if you will.

At least three things have kept Serban away: opera, Romania, and Columbia University. In the past decade, he has been more active in opera than in theater, directing at leading opera houses in Paris, Vienna, London, Geneva, Venice, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and elsewhere. Also, in 1990, after more than 20 years of exile from his native Romania, he returned to his homeland in the post-Ceauçescu era to become artistic director of the Romanian National Theatre. His mission was to reinvent this important cultural institution and lead it into the 21st century. "A moment of transition is always a great opportunity," Serban says, "but it was a naive and utopian idea on my part. After the so-called revolution, the heavy ruins of the bureaucracy continued to send out so much dust that nothing could be done. After two years, I realized that it was impossible. After three years, I had to give up and leave."

A two-time exile from Romania, Serban returned to the USA and to Columbia, where he became director of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies and the head of a new graduate program in acting. He sees a university theater program as a more realizable utopia: "You can work in a laboratory situation, experiment, do research, make mistakes and start again, and it almost does not matter because everything that one worries about in the commercial theater -- ticket sales, the New York Times critic -- doesn't apply. It is an ideal situation for me." Even so, Serban feels a bit exiled way uptown on the Columbia campus because "theater in New York as it is now doesn't interest me. I appreciate it for what it is, jolly entertainment, but that's not really what I would like to do. Frankly, I don't quite find my place now in New York. Joe Papp is no longer alive. Ellen Stewart has no money, and all she can afford for me is to endlessly revive [Serban's landmark 1970s staging of] The Trojan Women."

Perhaps that is why Serban said yes when Brustein called "out of the blue" about The Taming of the Shrew. In the middle of rehearsals, he admits to feeling very much at home, despite his long absence from Cambridge and ART. "The company has changed a lot, but the spirit of the company is the same. And somehow they know how `crazy' I am, how much I surprise everybody at rehearsal, and how much I like changing things and taking risks and not letting anybody get comfortable with anything, including myself."

The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, if not downright upset, given what from a contemporary perspective can only be seen as its overt sexism. Katharina, better known as Kate, the wild-tempered and shrewish daughter of a wealthy Paduan merchant, finds herself subject to the authority and will of her new husband, Petruchio of Verona. The newlyweds engage in a series of ferocious marital skirmishes that leads to a famous speech in the final scene in which Kate advocates a wife's total devotion to her husband and lord. Nowadays, this scene is often played with extreme irony, sometimes to the point of having Kate wink to the audience to signal the insincerity of her capitulation to male dominance.

For Serban, this approach is unsatisfying and inadequate. In those productions, he jokes, "the play should be called The Untaming of the Shrew. If we could change the title, it would be fantastic. But that action is incorrect. Four hundred years ago feminism did not exist. Kate's final monologue was not shocking. She had to look tamed. Today, you still have to believe she is tamed -- in spite of feminism." The challenge for Serban is to do that without utterly alienating his audience, and the key to that is getting the play "to work simultaneously on different levels."

First, there is the undeniable level of broad and boisterous farce that goes back through the Italian commedia dell'arte to the ancient Roman comedy of Plautus. This is the horizontal axis of the play, as it were, with its battle of the sexes, romantic machinations, and comic by-play. Then there is the vertical axis, what Serban calls the play's "parable of the soul." As he sees it, "inside each of us there is a shrew, an animal, a beast, an uneducated part of the self, a horse that kicks that has to go to school. The whole play is an allegory for how one can tame the beast inside one's self." For Kate, that way is to use Petruchio as a surrogate psychiatrist who "mirrors her madness in doing something wild just to show her how she is. The more she sees herself, the less she wants to be that way. By the end, she is free from inhabiting that beast in herself." On this level, Kate's final submission is not so much to her earthly husband as to some higher spiritual imperative.

Serban's dual interest in the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the play accounts for his decision to retain The Taming of the Shrew's so-called Induction, a prologue to the action proper that features a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly who wakes up from sleeping one off to find himself transformed into a well-to-do nobleman. The play that follows is actually one being presented by a traveling theater troupe specifically for him. This raises abiding Shakespearean questions about the nature of identity and the self, about reality versus illusion, about the theater itself, questions that Serban promises to give a decidedly Pirandellian twist. "There is a need and a desire in me to reach something that touches the miraculous. I think that's why I keep working in the theater. I make theater in search of the miraculous."

The Taming of the Shrew begins previews tomorrow night (January 30); it will run in repertory through March 21. Call 547-8300 for tickets.