Patty Gallagher, a professor of performance, play and design at UCSC, flaunts a deliberate hip, bold look in her thick, black-rimmed glasses. With a sheaf of thousands of pages of Shakespearean plays stored mentally upstairs, and an ability to eloquently explain the relevance of a 16th-century scribe to today’s modern students, Gallagher’s work—as a teacher, Equity actor and director—is a needed antidote in these uncertain times.
Opening Feb. 14 in the eXperimental Theater space at UCSC’s Theater Arts Center, Comedy of Errors puts Gallagher in the director’s seat. The Bard’s shortest play, Comedy of Errors is “really ripped off from Plautus’ play, The Menaechmus Twins, which—like Comedy of Errors—was an identical twin play. You can trace a line from Roman comedy (200 BCE) to today’s contemporary sitcoms,” Gallagher says from her campus office.
Like Shakespeare, Gallagher finds inspiration in the eras that preceded her. When mulling over the history of comedic types and the plot lines for Comedy of Errors, the professor turned her gaze to the work of actors like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.
“We are using a large stage,” Gallagher says, “and I thought it would be fun to use silent movies as a touchstone. I’m working with brilliant designers like David Cuthbert, who’s been on Broadway, and my colleague Pamela Rodríguez-Montero. They are helping me create a sweet little jewel box of a theater onstage that is reminiscent of the silent film era. The script lends itself to that era.”
Theater is its own universe. Painters, prop designers, set builders, lighting technicians and music composers are all working to build a time machine that the audience can board, and then dream that they are in another world. The weeks of grueling rehearsals bring actors together in a way that one usually only finds in committed relationships. Once the curtain falls on the final performance and the after-party hits the wee hours, the actors disband, often never to see each other, until the next production.
“I feel like there’s always this really beautiful sense of mystery in theater. Seeing it unfold is joyous and unpredictable. Watching the conversations between all these artists, with all their different perspectives and skills, come cohesively together is inspiring,” Gallagher says.
“I’ve told my actors this: ‘I am a curator of good ideas.’ I tell them to come in with ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas. And I arrive with a sense of discovery. And then I let these beautiful knuckleheads go from there.”
Comedy of Errors centers around two sets of identical twins, and if you show up with your twin, or come dressed like twins, the tickets are two for one. Which is fun. But there is something about twins that goes beyond the visual similarities. There are famous cases of separated twins who end up in the same professions, and name their children the same names. They exhibit identical behaviors and personalities that seem hardwired. It’s uncanny.
“I’ve been working with the actors playing the twins and telling them that even though they have been separated for decades, they need to have signature gestures that are hardwired into their DNA,” Gallagher says.
Take a slight step back from this twin fact, and one might question who exactly are we? How much of our personality is inevitable? And could it be that maybe, just maybe, we have a twin out there? Our missing piece.
“In Comedy of Errors, the governments,” begins Gallagher, “banned each other’s citizens from their soil. But a father arrives, on foreign land, looking for his child. When they find out that he’s a stranger, from the wrong country, they condemn him to death unless he can pay off a ransom. And at the end of the day (spoiler alert), he finds his family.”
Comedy of Errors is a beautiful story about the anguish of separated families, and the joy of a bittersweet reunion. Ain’t it just like Shakespeare to capture themes that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago?
Comedy of Errors runs Feb. 14–16 and Feb. 20–23 at UCSC’s Theater Arts Center, eXperimental Theater. Thursday-Friday shows start at 7:30pm; Sunday shows at 3pm. Tickets: $5-$20.
