In March 2024, the Theatre Program of UAlbany’s Department of Music and Theatre presented The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s classic comedy of the battle between the sexes, to a full audience for five days and nights in the Performing Arts Center Lab Theatre. UAlbany Magazine followed the company of over 60 actors, designers and crew members to see what it takes to put on a show from the earliest stages of planning to opening night.

In this production, director Ryan Garbayo offered up a fresh interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s earliest works about taming an unruly woman by flipping gender on its head and having nearly all the roles played by women or female-identifying students.  

“This is a play that’s been controversial since the 1590s when it was first performed,” said Garbayo, visiting assistant professor of acting and a professional actor with nearly two decades of experience performing Shakespeare.  

In Shrew, boastful Petruchio attempts to tame headstrong Katherine, the eldest daughter of a wealthy lord, into a compliant, obedient bride using physical and psychological means of torment. Many know of the play and its misogynistic undertones from 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 film adaptation starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles.

“While a lot has changed since Shakespeare’s time, it still feels resonant to today,” Garbayo said.

Auditions

The Theatre Program first announced it would be producing Shrew on Showcase Day 2023 — nearly a full year before it would hit the stage.  

The program makes a point of staging Shakespeare and other classical plays at least every other semester in an effort to provide theater students with the experience of performing in verse, said Kate Walat, program director and resident playwright at UAlbany. Shrew, like other Shakespeare plays, is written in iambic pentameter.

“The students were really excited about the idea,” she said.

Auditions were held at the end of 2023 and nearly two dozen actors were cast in roles by January.

The decision to go with a nearly all-female cast gave students the opportunity to embody male archetypes they might otherwise never get to play, Garbayo said.

“So the women are wearing mustaches and they're doing push-ups and they are the patriarchy, right? And so they give the lesson on how to tame their wives to a group of ne'er-do-well, awful, young frat-like boys who are sitting in the audience receiving the lesson throughout the show.”

Set Build

Students in John Knapp’s Introduction to Technical Theatre class helped build the set for Shrew, which involved constructing two Elizabethan-style platforms and columns on each end of the Lab Theatre.

Designed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Set Design Nora Smith and drafted by Knapp to include raised seating on opposite sides for the audience, the set was envisioned as a space that fosters audience participation.

“We can get the audience to almost feel like they're one of the performers because people on one side are going to be looking at people on the other side throughout the whole show,” said Knapp, who has run UAlbany’s scene shop since 1998. “So whatever they're looking at and laughing at or shocked by, everybody on the other side is going, oh, check them out.”

In this way, set design was crucial to Garbayo’s reinterpretation of the play, which invited viewers to question what is so funny about men teaching other men how to control women.

“It's this broad, physical, raunchy comedy,” Garbayo said. “The audience is looking at each other throughout this show and gets to see how the other half laughs at these jokes. And ultimately, they become part of the naughtiness of this story. By the end of the last scene, my hope is that the audience starts to ask themselves, why have I been laughing at this stuff for two and a half hours? Is it really that funny and what part do I play in perpetuating this behavior?”

Getting Into Character

Student actors employed a number of methods to get into the heads of their characters. In addition to one-on-one coaching from Garbayo, many studied up on their characters during downtime.  

Isabel Sanchez, a senior majoring in theatre and education, originally auditioned for the lead role of Katherine but found herself drawn to Petruchio after getting a callback for his character.

“Going over his lines I was super, super intrigued because he's such a horrible person and — I think from an artistic standpoint — an incredibly dynamic and complex character,” she said. “And that's something that I'm always searching for whenever I'm auditioning for roles. So by the end of callbacks, I was crossing my fingers for Petruchio.”

With close to 100 lines in the show, memorizing Petruchio’s dialogue was no easy task. But every actor has a system. For Sanchez, it involves writing her lines out fully by hand and then abbreviating them into a code she can draw on when her memory blanks. She repeats this process as many times as necessary.

“This is my second notebook for this show alone,” she said.

Costume Design

Costume production began a year early. In Spring 2023, Visiting Assistant Professor of Costumes Anne Croteau, who leads UAlbany’s costume shop, had students start sewing men’s doublets and breeches. In total, Croteau and her students would end up making at least 23 costumes from scratch, with designs pulled from a book of authentic Tudor patterns and fabrics pulled from the shop’s stock room.

Croteau and students added contemporary details to some costumes for comedic effect, like unibrows for all the male characters and Slinkies designed to mimic Elizabethan ruff collars.

“The biggest thing was the period garments, which are elaborate,” said Croteau. “I can't shop this stuff and have it be what I want it to be without paying a fortune from a professional costume company. So we started building costumes without the actors last spring — not finishing things, but getting started — so that when our actors came in we could start fine tuning and fitting things to them. No way we could do this much in just seven weeks of a semester.”

Tech Crew

A technical crew worked behind the scenes with a stage manager to ensure lighting, rigging, sound and other show elements came together for a smooth production. Lighting design was overseen by Jared Klein, a faculty member in Skidmore College’s Theater Department, in his first collaboration with UAlbany.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals were held almost every weeknight and included weekends as opening night approached. Above, actors warm up with icebreakers and vocal exercises.

Music Coordinator Elizabeth Gerbi of the Music & Theatre Department oversaw the musical production of Shrew, which incorporated late 1990s, early 2000s and contemporary hip-hop into the show.

Race to the Finish

After seven weeks of prep and with just two days to go until opening night, the cast and crew race to finish up final details of the show ahead of their first dress rehearsal.

“We're in good spirits,” said Garbayo. “There's good morale with the cast and crew and all the designers. It's just a lot of work and it's a compressed amount of time to put it all together. There's just those last-minute things, you know, like sewing buttons. But I think everybody's in a great spot.”

Some students hold multiple roles backstage. Junior Arianna Bozac served on the makeup, costume and wardrobe crews, sewing costumes and assisting with wardrobe changes in between scenes.

“I think my creative juices flow the best when I’m doing makeup,” she said. “It’s like painting, but it’s a face.”

Ahead of their first dress rehearsal and seeing each other in costume for the first time, Garbayo  pictured below in a hat, holds a group huddle and reminds students of how far they’ve come.

“Seven weeks ago, there wasn’t a set, there weren’t chairs, there weren’t costumes. Nobody knew a single line. Some of us hadn’t even read the play,” he said. “It’s just such an achievement that all of us who have our own individual independent talents, skills and abilities can coalesce and create something that is truly alchemical. Now alchemy is something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And there’s no way that this show could be pulled off without the efforts of every single person in this room doing what they do.”

1, 2, 3 Shrew!

On opening night in early March, patrons file into the Performing Arts Center Lab Theatre. After nearly a year of planning and preparation, it’s finally showtime.

Nervous energy is high as the audience takes their seats. Before the room dims and the show begins, Garbayo reminds the cast and crew that the long rehearsals spent “figuring out the nitty gritty” are now behind them.  

“Now we get to play again,” he said. “I know a lot has to happen with costumes and lights and all that. But at the end of the day, this is a play. And a play is meant to be play. So bring that silly, stupid, creative, funny, goofy, naughty behavior and give that gift to this audience tonight.”

“I can become very psychological about my performance,” said Sanchez, who plans to pursue acting in New York after she graduates this spring. “I get in my head, I'm really focused on the work and the lines and the story. But if you don't have fun with it, if you don't find the joy and experimentation in it, then it's not going to be enjoyable. So I remind myself to have fun on stage and remember that this is what I love to do.”

“This is a crazy, weird, strange, sometimes upsetting — often upsetting — but very funny world that we’ve created,” Garbayo said. “So many hours went into this and I could not be more proud of all the work that we’ve all done.”