To Have and To Hold
There is something wonderfully perverse about naming two sisters Kate and Bianca after the heroines of Shakespeare’s "The Taming of the Shrew" and then setting them loose in the 21st century, where the old machinery of courtship has become at once more liberated, more commercial, and considerably more bewildering. In Laura Lapidus’ "To Have and To Hold," directed by Zoë Adams, and now playing at Chashama’s 154 Theater, Shakespeare’s notoriously troublesome romantic comedy becomes the occasion for a much more contemporary inquiry: What happens when the stories we inherit about love, marriage, womanhood, and ourselves collide with the stories we have painstakingly written on our own? The result is a buoyant, intelligent, unexpectedly tender comedy that knows its Shakespeare but refuses to be imprisoned by him. [more]