The Atlanta Shakespeare Company’s Comedy of Errors

Dori Coblentz (Georgia Institute of Technology) 

The Atlanta Shakespeare Company’s Comedy of Errors exploited the chaotic timescape of this play for its comic potential. Aemilia’s summary of the play’s action, “Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons; and till this present hour / My heavy burden ne’er delivered” (5.1.402-404) seemed to organize Director Jaclyn Hofmann’s approach. Aemilia’s labor, dilated over three decades, aptly represents the play’s engagement with gendered experiences of time. The comedy famously treats time both as a commodifiable unit of measurement and as the theatrical skill of timing. Time becomes a character in an extended syphilis joke, clocks become characters and characters transform into clocks, all while the Dromios are called out continually for mistakes in timing, as the Antipholus twins perceive them as being either too early or too late. By emphasizing the scenes of temporal embodiment and with some creative stagecraft, Hofmann directed a competent, entertaining production that could be enjoyed upon several levels.

This production’s interest in temporality was signaled early during Aegeon’s narration of his distressing circumstances. An ominous and mournful drum cadence marked the beginning of Aegeon’s sentencing as he knelt before Solinus in a balcony at the middle of the stage. A large dropcloth hung beneath him occupied center stage. As Aegeon began to narrate, a larger-than-life silhouette of Aemilia appeared upon the sheet. Her gestures, such as frantically juggling two, then four infants, provided a comic gloss to Aegeon’s idealized narration of her pregnancy’s…