The Taming - A New Political Comedy

There are over 40 readings so far, here are a few who have published their details. If you are producing a reading that isn’t listed let me know and thanks for your bravery and artistry! 

All royalties I receive from purchased script copies will go to Planned Parenthood. 

Read Charles M. Blow’s “The Anti-Inauguration” in the NYTimes here before you see a #TameTrump reading and join the resistance! As Meryl said: take your broken heart and go make art. 

And check out our article on Bust.com, “#TameTrump: The Radical Inauguration Day Readings Of Lauren Gunderson's 'The Taming'! 

- Lauren

AKRON, OH - Rubber City Shakespeare - 

ATLANTA, GA - The Weird Sisters Theatre Project in Association with Synchronicity Theatre and 7 Stages - 7pm

AUSTIN, TX - The New Movement - 4:30pm

BENTONVILLE, AR - ArkansasStaged - 7pm

CARRBORO, NC - The ArtsCenter

CHARLOTTE, NC - Donna Scott Productions - 7pm

CHICAGO, IL - The Comrades - 10pm

CINCINNATI, OH - Sheatre - Cincinnati Women’s Theatre @ Know Theatre- 7pm 

COLUMBUS, OH - The Tipping Point Theatre Co - 8pm

DENVER, CO - LG - Noon

ELKINS PARK, PA - Pulley and Buttonhole - 7pm

EVANSVILLE, IN - ThinkPink Productions - 8pm

FAIRFIELD, CA - Roving Shakespeare - 8pm

GRAND HAVEN, MI - Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Co - 7pm

HOUSTON, TX - Main Street Theater – 10am and 7pm

HOUSTON, TX - Queensbury Theatre 

IOWA CITY, IA - Riverside Theatre

NASHVILLE, TN  - Tennessee Women’s Theatre Project - 1pm

NEW YORK, NY - The Night Shift - The Drama Book Shop Inc. - 8pm

NEW YORK, NY - The Lady Business (Jan 18, 8pm) 

NEW YORK, NY -  Jimmy's No. 43 Backroom Cabaret Lounge - 7:30pm (doors open at 6:30pm)

OMAHA, NE - Shelterbelt Theater - 7:30pm

OMAHA, NE - Creighton University Theatre, Alph Psi Omega- 7:30pm

OWENSBORO, KY - Brescia University

PITTSBURGH, PA - Pinnacle Productions

PORTLAND, OR - Salt and Sage Productions / Portland Actors Conservatory - 8pm

RALEIGH, NC -  Bare Theatre - 7:30pm

ROCHESTER, NY - Aspie Works - *Jan 19th* 7:30pm

REDWOOD CITY, CA - Dragon Productions - 8pm

SACRAMENTO, CA - California Stage R25 - 7pm

SALT LAKE CITY, UT - Pussycat Productions 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - EXIT Theatre - 8:30pm

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 250 Van Ness Ave - 7pm

SEATTLE, WA - With Interesting People @ ACT Theatre - 8pm

SPRINGFIELD, MO - Missouri State University

TAMPA, FL - Silver Meteor Gallery

WASHINGTON, DC - Third Floor - 8pm

WATERTOWN, MA - Flat Earth Theatre - 8pm

WILLIAMSTON, MI - Williamston Theatre, 7pm

Any theatre company, group, or person who wants to do a reading of THE TAMING on Inauguration Day 2017 can do so for free, with thanks to Playscripts, Inc!

I wrote this all-female political farce to unpack the deep frustration of a divided and obstructionist patriarchy, to laugh with the painful truth about extremism on both sides, to toy with our country's history and wrestle with it's foundational imperfections. But mine ends with the smartest woman in the room in charge.

And I wrote it before HAMILTON so my Hamilton jokes were legit and trendsetting :)

You can read the play for free online here: https://www.playscripts.com/play/2735

Place an order for the rights and select an "offline" form of payment (check or purchase order). Then email [email protected] and tell them that your reading is a part of the Inauguration Day project and you will not be charged.

Send or post a picture of your reading and tag #TameTrump

A few tips and tricks to help you totally nail this wild little show. 

It’s a farce. Farce works when the characters do not think they are in a farce. They can’t “play the joke” or else it kills the joke. This is really about commitment. Characters have to commit to their goals and ideas no matter how crazy. They have to commit to them even if they juts committed to the exact opposite thing a second before. All or nothing, baby. 

Pacing. “Faster, funnier” is a real thing. Don’t let pacing fall until you hit a written “pause” or “beat”. Seriously. GO FAST, Y’ALL. Push it until you slam into those pauses. It’s written so that the fights escalate in intensity and speed until a pause changes the game. This is a play about people not listening to each other so go go go. Then, when we get a pause, we know something important is happening. The pauses can help tell the story by letting the characters (and the audience) breath at a critical moment of discovery or understanding. 

The Founders. Don’t play the historically accurate version. Play the anachronistic frat boy version. The language is modern so play these dudes like modern dude except with 18th Century wigs and stockings. It’s funnier if they aren’t caricatures of “old timey” folks, but are bros. You know how guys use a high pitched “lady voice” when they pretend to be women? Do that but reverse the sexes for this act of the play. Also notice when the same phrases or motivations cross over from the Pat/Kat/Bianca acts to the 1787 act. 

There are moments of sincerity but you have to earn them. The last moments of act 2, when Pat/Madison sees the gridlocked, misunderstood, partisan future of America she is sincere. When Kat and Pat are dreaming up improvements to the Constitution at the beginning of Act 3, these are real and sincere ideas. 

From Marin Shakespeare’s interview here.

How did a play called The Taming come to include the Founding Fathers?

With the super-success of Hamilton, the founding fathers are cool again, and we know you’ll love The Taming—which looks at today’s political structure via a quick visit to George Washington and James Madison. For the record, The Taming came before Hamilton, by several years in fact, but playwright Lauren Gunderson is grateful for its popularity because she shares so many of its goals to re-engage the general public in civics—and also because Taming audiences now “get” her Hamilton references better; as she says, “Those Hamilton references used to get a titter, and now they get a guffaw.”

Born out of frustration at partisan gridlock, The Taming is Lauren Gunderson’s attempt to use that frustration for good. Merritt interviewed her about the play in mid-June, and she had a lot to say about our nation’s history and why she loved putting our Founding Fathers on the stage.

MERRITT: What was the impetus for this play?

GUNDERSON: I was—and still am—infuriated that our politicians fail to come together into the kind of political alliance that has to happen to make government fluid and representative. People end up suffering when government shuts down, from the biggest issues of infrastructure and access to health care and such down to not being able to enjoy our national parks simply because our representatives are acting like toddlers. I felt like, how can I talk about this artistically and with comedy? I ended up creating a range of characters who can have the debate we should be having, putting people in the room where we can all say all the things we want to say about the other sides. You can’t say this stuff in polite company, but you can say it on stage.

MERRITT: So, why talk about the Founding Fathers?

GUNDERSON: I love examining our history by comparing it to now. The argument from the Right is that we need to preserve the constitution as the founders intended it, but the founders expected we would revisit the constitution every generation or so to keep it up to date. They were collaborating. We can’t pretend it was rarified environment, and they were changing all the time. They hadn’t even finished the Constitution and they were already amending it.

What’s fun about telling the story this way is that we get to burst the mythological bubble of perfection and wisdom of founders. They are real people, trying to prove shit to each other and needing to compromise. They are politically intelligent but emotionally greedy and stupid all while being, yes, visionary proud patriots. Like all of us, they were hypocrites, arranging their patriotism to serve their purse not just their heart, and I love imagining their struggle of get it as right as possible, with all the obstacles they had. I mean Madison’s internal struggle over slavery alone—owning slaves and yet trying to stop the slave trade, knowing he can’t get agreement to abolish slavery as an institution but thinking he might have a chance at a compromise over ending the importation of slaves. And thinking of the ripple effect from one compromise—for example, without the electoral college, we would have had Gore as President instead of George W. Bush… I just find it fascinating to contemplate.

MERRITT: Or the unintended consequences a slightly different wording can have. I think of the Key & Peele Second Amendment skit, which leaves you with a bit of a “be careful what you wish for” feeling:

GUNDERSON: “Yes! And over all what I want to leave the audience with is the reminder that this government of ours isn’t biblical—it was made up by humans. If we don’t like it, we can change it. Yet over time, our sense of optimism has been drained and we’ve been made to feel government is something shady and we can’t change anything.

To me, the most poignant part of the play is the end of the 2nd act when Pinkney and Madison are dreaming of the future of America—and seeing completely different opportunities. I want people crying when they feel they should be laughing. This isn’t the dream of the Founders—they’d be upset, not proud. If we really want them to be happy, we’ve got to get out shit together. The recent Senate filibuster is stirring up some energy again, and maybe through actions like that—and people seeing a play in which optimism reigns—might jump-start us again. I hope it will, anyway.

MERRITT: Indeed. Any last thoughts?

Excerpted from Marin Shakespeare’s blog:

“Asked about her inspiration for this play, Gunderson told us: “I’ve always had issues with TAMING OF THE SHREW because its resolution requires that a woman be “tamed”; so I wanted to address that unresolved, extreme viewpoint. Same with what’s happening in American politics: there is no center, just extreme viewpoints, and that’s not productive. So writing this comedy is a way to address feelings of frustration and great grief in a way that makes the world better. I realize that sounds kind of ‘unicorn-y,’ but that’s what I hope to do. I suppose, like the jesters of old, I’m using my comedy to speak truth to power, in a way that helps and entertains my audience.”

Even when it was new, SHREW elicited strong responses: the Bard’s own sometime writing partner John Fletcher was inspired to overthrow Petruchio in his THE WOMAN’S PRIZE, OR THE TAMER TAMED—which was produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime. (Oh, how we wish we could have heard Will’s review!)

So the negativity of Gunderson’s response might not be new, but her spin is entirely fresh and beyond timely in an election year of unusual ferocity. The play opens in a hotel room, where a beauty queen whose pageant talent is constitutional reform has kidnapped a right-wing senator’s aide and a left-wing “tru-sader”—swearing not to let them out until they help her re-create a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

In Gunderson’s hands, the power battle over sexual politics in SHREW becomes the power of gender in politics in THE TAMING; the abuse of a woman in SHREW becomes the abuse of political power in THE TAMING; and the yelling about proper behavior no longer refers to gender roles but to our roles as citizens of our shared country. 

As the playwright says, “I wanted to keep SHREW’s weird sexual connection between gender and power—politics too is all about power, the aphrodisiac and bravado of power. Whoever controls the Senate comes out with this swagger of ‘suck my dick’ and that’s the tone of how they do their business, just like Petruchio goes about his business in SHREW. I wanted to work within that same sexually-charged atmosphere to create a sensual, sexy play… without men.”

And like in SHREW, the play all comes down to the ending. No spoilers here, but Gunderson subverts Kate’s surprising transformation into subservience in SHREW into something deeply powerful and powerfully timeless. As Gunderson says, “Loyalty—and Patriotism—is not about putting your hand under your husband’s foot. Congress works for the people. It’s not about us putting our hand under your foot—it’s about you, the politician, putting your hand under our foot.” 

REVIEW: ‘The Taming,’ incisive satire of American politics, opens Shakespeare & Co. season

By J. Peter Bergman - Tuesday, Jun 7

The opening play at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, is also the opening salvo for an election year of entertainment NOT mentioning the presumptive Republican nominee. For that alone I would be grateful. However, the play, “The Taming,” by Lauren Gunderson is also a funny, fundamentally sound and sane look at the insanity of American politics in this and other centuries. Written for three women and produced by a company that has always featured strong, vital actresses, the show introduces three players who are making their company debuts in this work.

The basic premise here is that a Miss America candidate, actually a finalist, can exploit the American male ego and at the same time explode the American political system to create an entirely new format for democracy through constitutional law. To some people reading this the plot may not seem funny; for others it may appear ridiculous; the truth of the matter is that this is a sound proposition played for both laughs and emotional gravity. The playwright has created a world that already exists, peopled it with three essentially accurate depictions of types that exist and combined it with a Jean-Paul Sartre premise that creates permutations of relationships that foster action and acquiescence in equal measure. What fun!

After a proper introduction to each of the three characters, establishing their differences and their assumed strengths, two of them find themselves locked in a room with no exit, no phones and less clothing than they started with. It is their responsibility to come to some sort of understanding about one another’s values and value. The intended outcome of this forced meeting becomes clear when the third woman enters the picture. To say that the shocking event is enthralling is saying little, for as much as the two captive women find the premise appalling and undoable, they and we are as intrigued as possible.

The second “act” (this play, at just over ninety minutes is played without an intermission) takes us back to 1787 when James Madison was drafting both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under George Washington’s watchful eye. Our three heroines assume roles as unanticipated as their modern situation and the play takes a turn into the hilarity of farce. I cannot recall having such a good time with a political diatribe in my long and involved life, not even when working, years and years ago, for Bella Abzug back in New York City.

Maddie Jo Landers plays Katherine, Miss Georgia, the Constitutional Law graduate, whose ambition is to be the most successful pageant queen and political power in the country. Her slender, blonde figure is not exactly a new political secret for someone else with a thirst for power presents a similar, if older, image to us today. Landers plays the beauty queen perfectly and every time she speaks to her topic she alters our view of her. She is a chameleon on stage, altering to the roles required with simple poise — quite the pageant queen in fact — and bringing an honesty to her 18th century parts that make us laugh even harder than we have before. Here we have a very talented actress able to make real what is patently unreal. She is a treasure.

Tangela Large undertakes the dark role of a Senatorial manipulator whose interest in power plays into the goals of others. Large is big on bluster and blasts through falsehoods with bombastic skill and beautiful diction. I could listen to this actress on any topic and, in fact, did so for the evening with relish and pleasure. She brings to her role a unique sexuality, a quality that allows her to assume any role in any relationship regardless of gender or influence or even interest. To watch Tricia unwind, rewind and tighten her springboard of intentions is worth the price of the ticket. Large makes her work here an essential part of the fabric of political disruption.

As her counterpart, or counterpoint, in the social strata of political rhetoric, Lucy Lavery plays Bianca for every abrupt and abusive possibility open to such a character. Bianca is a woman with secrets who shouts her intent constantly and reveals little until she is compelled to, or caught in, her manufactured lies. She is a blogger-journalist with a mission and her mission is reflected in her 18th century character as well. When her world begins to crumble this character becomes the funniest of all and Lavery plays this transition with marvelous physical transformations.

Under the clearly clinical guidance of director Nicole Ricciardi, this trio of players maintains a dynamic range of highly specific movements, vocal work and interactions as they learn to “lead with greed, baby.” That this play works so very well is due in no small part to the absolute control the director has maintained over her actors. The set by John McDermott is excellent and the costumes by Esther Van Eek are delectable. James Bilnoski has designed lighting for this play that works for both time periods while Amy Altadonna’s sound design keeps us aware of the world outside and the changes in our perception.

I don’t usually say this so early in the summer season, but given the opportunity I would gladly revisit this play for a second chance to catch a glimpse of these people in their situation. I had that good a time.

_______

PREVIEW: At Shakespeare & Co. ‘The Taming’ is funny and brave

By Ann St. Clair

Lenox — No one ever accused Nicole Ricciardi of being a timid theatre director. Last year, at Shakespeare & Company, she and actors Tod Randolf and Bridget Sarancino gave us a brilliant and searing “The How and the Why.” This year, in the midst of one of the most surprising and disturbing presidential election seasons ever recorded, she and three New York actors (Maddie Jo Landers, Tangela Large, and Lucy Lavely) are bringing Lauren Gunderson’s “The Taming,” a Red State/Blue State romp to our region for the first time.

In an interview last week, Ricciardi mused over the fact that Gunderson is clear that she is not a fan of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” yet she uses it as a launch pad for “The Taming,” particularly its play with sexuality, and its wild physical comedy. Shakespeare lovers will recognize the characters’ names (Bianca and Katherine, and Patricia for Petruchio). And of course, there are the animals! But the director advised me not to spend time looking for other links. This satire meets us in the sociopolitical here and now, challenging our preconceptions, knocking the laughter out of our bodies as it knocks down mental and psychological walls.

The first scene in an Atlanta hotel room shows us a locked-in beauty queen, a hide-bound, overworked Senator’s assistant, and a cranky liberal activist and blogger. All hell breaks loose. Then, in a seeming blink, we are transported to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The three actors, all women, play eight roles, and three additional off-stage voices. Three of their characters are men: Charles Pickney of South Carolina, and James Madison and George Washington of Virginia. Among verbal jousts and pillow fights, threats and bargains lurk school civics lessons in dazzling new light. We see, for example, that the Electoral College was deliberately put in the Constitution because it is undemocratic. We’re reminded that only property-owning, white men were originally permitted to vote. By the time “The Taming” travels to the Miss Georgia Pageant, the audience is ready to look into Gunderson’s version of the future.

The play highlights differences and animosities among the founders, their worries that the new system they were bringing into being might not even last a generation, and their belief that the Constitution should be revised by amendments and future constitutional conventions. The founders themselves were anything but reverent about the Constitution; they craved opposition and dissent to ensure a vibrant, healthy republic. “If a majority of us don’t understand the process of our government, it’s never going to improve,” says the director. She and Gunderson want laughter to disarm us, to remind us of the constant limitations of extreme partisanship. While noting the necessity of compromise to get things done, it recognizes its pitfalls and unintended consequences. Nobody’s “sacred cow” is sacred.

One of the sly pleasures of “The Taming” is watching its female characters grow wiser and stronger before our eyes. Katherine, for example, begins by being an unrecognized, crabby assistant, totally defined by and bitter about her job, and ends as a fully realized human being. “The Taming” premiered in San Francisco in 2013, making it prescient for today’s nearly unprecedented electoral competition. Interestingly, its sexual and gender givens would have been remarkable ten years ago, but emerge here as simple realities—so accepted that they can be laughed at. Nicole Ricciardi smiles at the end of our meeting. “This is the hardest play I’ve done so far,” she says. “And it’s only funny because it’s true.” She shakes her head, and matter-of-factly goes back to her cutting edge work.

________

Tennessee Women’s Theatre production of THE TAMING :)