Our first play in Ashland was a matinee of The Comedy of Errors, presented in the large indoor auditorium-style theatre, the Bowmer.

We entered to discover the depths of the stage concealed by a purple wall with purple dots on it, obviously seamed to open, and a chair with a light over it. Due to our fondness for ghost lights, it did not even occur to me to find this set-up ominous, until the lights went down and the Godfather theme started up.

You see, Ephesus, the setting of the play, is supposed to be a city where anything can happen, where the idea of witches knowing where your moles are and claiming they’re married to you is feasible, where you can find a conjurer to exorcise your husband in under five minutes, where a merchant can be threatened with death for nothing more than coming from the wrong town.

And therefore, the production was set in Las Vegas.

No, really. And it worked. The purple doors opened in various conformations, revealing (besides strings of lights) various casinos (complete with extras dressed according to each theme) - so that all the action that takes place upon ‘the mart’ takes place along the Strip. The Syracusans - Antipholus #1, Dromio #1 and the father, Egeon - were from Texas, which definitely made them seem fish out of water in the fast-paced frenzy of Las Ephesus. It also gave a sort of foreignness to Antipholus #1’s lyric moments - as if those moments of poetry, which are the principal means of his endearment to Luciana, were something she had never seen before in the hard, commercial world of the town. In short, it contributed to the frenzy and pace of the world of the play, and provided a believable context for the unbelievable muddle. Not to mention making the Duke a Don.

The other major innovation was doubling Antipholus with Antipholus, and Dromio with Dromio. If that strange sentence isn’t clear enough - where two men usually play the two twins, one did in each case. This increased our belief in the confusion - for only the accent (which wasn’t OVERdone) differentiated the pairs. For the parts where both twins appear, they merely proffered an appropriately dressed body double facing the wrong way, and performed some expert sleight of hand to shuffle the ‘real’ Antipholus or Dromio between his colocations.

What was bad about the production? Well, they added some things to the script - I cannot even recall them all - little one-off pop culture references. Some of them got big laughs, and some of them fell rather flat. I thought it was unnecessary, and really, the pop cultural gestures made with the original script were far more clever—such as having Dromio appropriate a lounge singer’s mike and do his series of riffs on how much he is beaten as a stand-up routine.

Bottom Line:
In short, a well-acted and well-thought out production, frothy, frenetic and fun. If you’re in Ashland, it’s worth a look. 8.5 out of 10