To Obey or Not to Obey : Grove Actor Makes a Case for the Husband of the Shrew in Shakespeare Classic

“The Taming of the Shrew” can be a tough sell nowadays. Especially if there happen to be any women in the house. After all, this Shakespearean comedy has the goods to set men-women relations back further than an Andrew Dice Clay-led coup at the National Organization for Women.

Carl Reggiardo knows that only too well. He’s the Grove Shakespeare Festival actor with the Herculean task each night of trying to engender sympathy for the character of Petruchio, the blustering windbag who boasts to his friends that he will marry any woman--no matter how “foul, old or curst and shrewd”--as long as her hand is linked to a big enough dowry.

This man deprives his bride--the willful Kate--of food and sleep on their wedding night as his way of “killing a wife with kindness.”

The same bloke instructs her that regardless of what any timepiece may tell her, “It shall be what o’clock I say it is.”

And the big “happy ending” arrives only after Kate delivers a ringing speech to gathered relatives and friends, that “such duty as the subject owes the prince, even such a woman oweth to her husband.” Then she bows before Petruchio and offers her hand for him to step on “if he please.”

Hardly a model of the ideal relationship of the ‘90s--unless, of course, we’re talking about the 1590s.

Or is it? I could be opening up Pandora’s Box, but I submit that, as someone once put it, there’s more here than meets the ear.

I asked Reggiardo to discuss his role and the play at large; in effect, to make the case that Petruchio isn’t the biggest sexist boor this side of “Cheers’ ” Sam Malone.

During a break in rehearsals earlier this week for “Our Town,” the Grove’s 1991-92 season opener that Reggiardo is directing (see accompanying story), the 6 foot 3, trimly bearded actor sat upstairs at the Gem Theatre, projecting the same gentleness as he spoke that Petruchio often shows Kate even while trying to “tame” her.

“What I’ve heard mostly,” he said, “is a positive female response, which is good, because the show does walk on some touchy waters in our time.”

Touchy indeed. At the wedding that follows their wild and wooly courtship, Petruchio slings his new bride over his shoulder and announces to the celebrants: “I will be master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, my household stuff, my field, my barn, my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything . . . “ (Before you dial 1-800-LYNCH-HIM, keep in mind that the Bard is slyly alluding to the Tenth Commandment against coveting a neighbor’s property--house, wife, ox and ass, in that order, included.)

Of course, one defense is the historical out--that Shakespeare simply was giving voice to the values and attitudes of his day. “Some audience members have mentioned that they’re glad the (Grove’s version) is costumed in Renaissance period,” said Reggiardo. “They feel it somehow works better that way, and that maybe the ideas expressed in the play are more acceptable given the fact that we can see it’s 400 to 500 years ago.”

Still, he added, “the thing that I feel is important (is) in the wooing scene in the first act, when they meet for the first time. Whatever Petruchio may have thought about money and about family prestige and all of that, when he arrives and hears about this woman who has wealth . . . once he deals with her for a while, he gains tremendous respect (and), if not at first sight, tremendous affection for her. . . . That becomes his major motivation.

“In a sense he’s sort of tamed also over the course of evening. By dealing with her and seeing changes she goes through, it affects him and he becomes a more reasonable person, much more accepting of her genuine femininity.” Indeed, at one point he realizes that Kate’s feelings truly have been hurt by his carrying on, and he immediately delivers a disarming speech about how much he appreciates her (despite her “mean array.”)

However, it is Kate who makes the most dramatic--or, at least, the more obvious--transformation, from an adolescent basket of raging hormones to . . . a willing doormat? Ay, there’s the rub.

As Reggiardo sees it, it’s more a case of Kate learning to rein in her wildly erratic temper, to focus her intense energy on appropriate targets, instead of launching machine-gun like bursts in every direction.

“She really does have strength and great vitality,” Reggiardo said. “Unfortunately it’s very aggressive all the time when we first meet her. What’s there is certainly there to be shaped, and whether it’s a man or a woman, it makes no difference. Somebody who’s that antisocial, maybe she has good reasons for it, but (that kind of person is) impossible to associate with.”

Petruchio sees this because he’s a lot like she is. He recognizes the need for both of them to calm down, and can think of only one way to accomplish that. As he tells Kate’s father before he’s even met her: “I am as peremptory as she proud-minded, and where two raging fires meet together they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.” (Note: two raging fires, not one.)

Ultimately, when Kate seems to back down, and goes so far as to argue that women are “bound to serve, love and obey” their husbands, even Petruchio is amazed.

‘I’ve tried to play Petruchio as being very much surprised that she carries on with all this subjugation (talk). And then when she offers her hand, it’s really a test of Petruchio. She’s not offering to put her hand, I don’t think, underneath his shoe, so much as saying, ‘If I get down to the floor on this, our relationship is finished.’

“What I’m trying to get across is that Petruchio realizes that and that’s where (his line), ‘Why, there’s a wench!’ comes from for me. It’s not, ‘Oh, there’s somebody who’s going to lay down and roll over.’ She’s going to play it straight across, as an equal with me. (It’s) the first time in his life (that Petruchio) has experienced that.

“At some point,” he added, he and his actress wife Karen Hensel “would like to do ‘Shrew.’ I think that would be a fiery production. Robin (Goodrin Nordli, who’s playing Kate at the Grove) and I have gotten along together so well during all of this (and) we’ve had a very easy-going relationship. But if we we’re going home every night talking about what those scenes meant, it might be something else!”

* The Grove Shakespeare Festival production of “Taming of the Shrew” continues Thursdays through Sundays at 8:30 p.m. through Sept. 21 at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Tickets: $16 to $23. Information: (714) 636-7213.