Shakespeare based The Comedy of Errors (ca.1591) on The Menæchmuses, an uproarious farce by Roman playwright Plautus, extracting fun from the misadventures of caused by the presence in one city of long-separated twins. Emelia, wife of Egeon, has twin sons, both named Antipholus, who are shipwrecked in infancy and carried away, one to Syracuse, the other to Ephesus. Antipholus of Syracuse goes to Ephesus in search of his brother. To make the confusion of identities more absurd, each brother has a slave named Dromio and both Dromios are indistinguishable twins. Adriana, the wife of the Ephesian Antipholus, mistakes the Syracusan for her husband and later has her real mate arrested as a madman. When the matter is ultimately brought into court, not only do the brothers recognize each other at last, but their mother Emelia, an abbess in whose priory the Syracusan had taken refuge during the excitement, and their father Egeon, who had come to Ephesus in search for his son, appear in court and the entire family is reunited.
The Drilling Company's Shakespeare in the Parking Lot has been a Lower East Side neighborhood institution for almost three decades. This year's production relocates Shakespeare's slapstick comedy of mistaken identity from Ephesus, a crossroads of the ancient world, to the Lower East Side of the 1990's, a diverse and polyglot community filled with larger-than-life comic characters. The Antipholus twins are re-imagined as attitude-infused, mood-altered slackers. This production is presented by The Drilling Company and co-presented by The Clemente.
