Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2, & The Taming of the Shrew

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 are basically William Greaves messing with everyone involved in the film. The first one is filmed entirely in 1968, and features a couple breaking up, and the film crew filming them being filmed and everyone getting testy and confused with everything that's going on. Take 2.5 is about half put together from footage left over from 1968, and the other half in 2004ish. Basically, it's a big mindfreak of a film. It's honestly hard to figure out what the hell is remotely real and what is just Greaves messing with you. It reminds me a lot of F for Fake, although neither is as good, mainly because Welles is one of the masters of cinema. There's a lot of split-screening, watching things from multiple cameras, and multiple people play the same characters. The second one is even more about the artifice of filmmaking than the first, but the first works better. Steve Buscemi usually makes everything better, but in this case, the actual film parts (the scenes that are ostensibly being filmed) are much weaker.

The Taming of the Shrew is/was (depending on when you read this) being performed for free at the Sidney Harman hall in Chinatown. It's a modern-set version, but the problem is that it's an inherently retrograde version of women's role in marriage. I enjoyed the play anyway. Back when I lived in Cincinnati and was watching around six plays a year or more, my favorite game before the performance was to read the cast biographies and see how long it took to get to someone who had been in Law and Order. This time it took four actors. Three if you include the SVU or CI spinoffs. Being so close to Baltimore, though, we got three actors from the Wire (one even gets a bio page on the official Wire website!). Even with that talent, the play belonged to Ian Merrill Peakes (Petruchio) and Louis Butelli (Grumio). Butelli channeled the wacky Brad Pitt perfectly, and really knows how to wield a flower bouquet. Peakes was hilarious, able to make his lying ass abusive husband charming, but even more impressively look good in a wedding dress. Ms. Albright and I had arrived way early, since we had no idea how the whole get a free ticket worked if you had a voucher for a ticket. It turns out we were the first there and so they were kind enough to ask us where we wanted to sit. After first being offered the front row (something I'm loathe to take after my unfortunate closeup at Metamorphoses, let alone having to look up for the entire show), I said I'd prefer something like the fifth or sixth row. We were given the end of the fifth row, and I was actually kinda annoyed because we could have gotten a seat in the middle. The end seats were perfectly fine, though, and I got a little bit of audience participation there. During the first wedding (Act 3, scene 2), Petruchio and Grumio show up late, and in this version, in a wedding gown, matching Katharina's (less train, though). They dance down the aisles towards the front, and, since aisle five has lots of leg room, Petruchio moved right in front of me and continued to dance and flashed me. I was shocked and scandalized and I couldn't stop laughing. The first three acts are really not all that bad from a misogyny standpoint, but man, the taming itself and the final speech are pretty offensive. Even with that, Shakespeare, especially free, is extremely enjoyable.