Meet the Director of Comedy of Errors, Kevin Asselin
Director's Notes from Kevin Asselin
One of the exciting things about Shakespeare’s plays is that, more than 400 years after they were written, we are still finding new ways to tell these stories.
Great works of literature don’t have to remain frozen in the time in which they were created. In fact, I believe one of the ways we keep literature and history alive is by continually reinvesting in them by bringing our own creativity, experiences, questions, music, humor, and 21st-century sensibilities to stories that have been passed from one generation to the next. Every time we do, we have the opportunity to discover something new.
For this production, we began by asking what The Comedy of Errors might look and sound like through our own eyes and ears. We’ve placed Shakespeare’s Ephesus in Long Island NY in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and music has become an important part of that world. As you’ll experience, a small rock band exists inside our story, not because Shakespeare needs classic rock, but because exploring the play through music helped us discover something about these characters and the lives they might lead.
Those kinds of choices are at the heart of adaptation. What happens if we place this story here? What if this character is a musician? What does an audience hear differently because of that choice? And, perhaps most importantly: What would you do with this story?
Beneath all the mistaken identities, missed connections and comic chaos of The Comedy of Errors is a story about people trying to answer a question that is as relevant today as it was four centuries ago: Who am I?
At the beginning of our play, a family has been separated for many years. Two brothers have grown up apart and traveled very different paths, unaware that somewhere in the world there is another person who shares his face and his history. When those paths finally cross, everything gets turned upside down.
In our own lives, some paths are chosen for us by circumstance, while others come from choices we make along the way. They lead us toward different people, experiences, successes, disappointments, and sometimes places we never expected to be. But everything we encounter becomes part of us. Perhaps finding ourselves isn’t about discovering one fixed version of who we are. Perhaps it’s about gathering the experiences that little by little make each of us more complete human beings in a complicated world.
That’s one reason I hope you’ll approach Shakespeare (and all of the classics) with curiosity rather than reverence. My hope is we take them off the shelf, question them, challenge them, and listen to them with your own ears. We can reimagine them through our own experiences.
These stories have survived because generations of people have continued to rediscover them.
Now they belong to all of us. Enjoy!!
What will you find in them—and what will you make of them?
