With any Shakespeare play I need an entry point for a contemporary audience. A reason for the world to exist now, in this room, for these people.

The Comedy of Errors was originally planned as part of Boomerang Theatre's free outdoor summer series, but Covid had delayed it. When I was finally asked to move forward, the outdoor production was no longer possible and we went looking for a found space instead. What we found was the Ladies' Tea Room at the historic Prince George Hotel on East 28th Street — a perfectly preserved 1904 gem with pastel trellised piers, an arched ceiling with glass clusters resembling vines, and a Rookwood fountain. The moment I walked in I knew exactly what the production wanted to be.

The play is built on missed connections, mistaken identities, and family mishaps spiraling gloriously out of control. The Tea Room felt unmistakably like the setting for a glamorous, chaotic event. Put those two things together and the answer was obvious: a Bravo reality television show. We drew our greatest inspiration from The Shahs of Sunset — that world of wealth, drama, family loyalty, and spectacularly public humiliation. The audience wasn't watching a Shakespeare play. They were watching an episode unfold in real time. Lighting was deliberately minimal — the room's overhead fixtures and strings of party bulbs. The space itself did the work.

I cast both Dromios — the servants at the center of the play's physical comedy — with women actors, Amy Crossman and Jessica Giannone, both of whom brought extensive clown training to the roles. The play calls for the Dromios to be beaten repeatedly by their masters, and I knew immediately that staging those scenes as written would be wrong. Amy and Jessica and I worked together to transform every beating into unmistakable clowning — physical, bold, and funny in a way that never confused comedy with violence.

There is also a monologue in the play built around what can only be described as fat shaming — a Dromio describing in grotesque detail a kitchen maid who is pursuing him. Rather than cut it or soften it, we recontextualized it entirely. The monologue became about the Dromio's fear of intimacy, his panic escalating until the maid transformed in his imagination into something comically gigantic — an absurdist creature of his own terror rather than an object of mockery.

I also cast Luciana — Adriana's sister, who falls in love with Antipholus — with a male actor. He wore a floral suit with matching shorts. Not a single word of the text was changed. He was Adriana's sister. He fell in love just as written. But the casting told another story — one where all of this was completely normal and entirely unquestioned by anyone in the world of the play.

The Comedy of Errors, at its heart, is about mistaken identity, reconciliation, and new possibilities. We opened in September 2021 — the city was just beginning to breathe again after eighteen months of shutdown. It felt important to not only reflect on what we had all been through, but to celebrate coming together again. So that is exactly what we did: we got all dressed up and threw a party. We celebrated the return of live theatre, the joy of artistic collaboration, and just how fun it is when things go terribly wrong.