Shakespeare's shrew gets modern twist in Tyler's 'Vinegar Girl'
How do you tame a shrew in 2016? Or rather, what to do in a post-post-feminist era with a certain Shakespeare comedy involving a man determined to break his wife's strong will?
Two very different alternatives are offered by a current New York production of The Taming of the Shrew and Anne Tyler's latest novel, Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare, 237 pp., ** ½ out of four stars), which revisits the play in a contemporary setting. The first, the Public Theater's wicked, scrumptious new staging of Shrew, uses an all-female cast directed by Phyllida Lloyd to spin dated (but enduring) ideals and expectations — relayed entirely by male actors in Shakespeare's day — on their heads.
Tyler, in comparison, seems fairly uninterested in provocation, or in spinning the story forward much. The characters in Vinegar Girl — the latest installation of Hogarth Shakespeare, a series that invites celebrated authors to adapt the dramas — are decidedly of our time, and they're invested, predictably, with warmth and unpretentious humor. Still, Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread) embraces more clichés than she challenges.
The Bard's Katherina, famously feisty elder daughter of the wealthy Baptista, has been reimagined by Tyler as Kate Battista, the glumly disappointed elder daughter of a perpetually distracted scientist. Where Katherina was defined by defiance, Kate's sulking is marked by a sort of sullen resignation. Having been "invited to leave" college after she insulted a male botany professor, Kate, now in her late 20s, works as a teacher's assistant at a preschool. Naturally, her candor and sophistication aren't always appreciated by her superiors, or the children's parents.
Kate also suffers at home, where she still lives with and cares for her widowed dad and teenage sister. The latter, Bunny, is a dimwitted, spoiled brat based most unflatteringly on Shrew's Bianca — though Tyler also identifies her as a modern creature, by having her declarative statements swoop up into question marks.
Dr. Battista is, as Baptista was, eager to marry off his older girl, though his motives are different: The scientist has a Russian lab assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose visa is about to expire after three years. Though Dr. Battista cannot yet pronounce Pyotr's name properly, he seems more interested in keeping the young man around than he is in Kate's happiness.
That's Kate's perception, at least. Tyler does little to challenge it initially, though Kate's father becomes one of the novel's more sympathetic figures, a well-meaning eccentric who still seems lost years after his wife's tragic death. Pyotr, too, grows more endearing, though the author overemphasizes the comic value of his broken English and overall awkwardness. ("Is some sort of microbe, I am thinking," he says of a persisting stuffed nose.)
This outsider is softer on the surface than Shrew's Petruchio, clearly more interested in pleasing Kate than conquering her. Tyler confirms her couple's happy ending with a charming but unsurprising epilogue — the perfect cherry for this well-made trifle.