In September, two new Shakespeare adaptations used the Bard’s canonical plays as jumping-off points to bring stories infused with Hispanic culture to Dallas audiences.
Echo Theatre’s world-premiere production of El Rey del Pollo by Anna Skidis Vargas, an adaptation of King Lear, and Shakespeare Dallas’ The Taming of the Shrew used the Spanish language to build settings and characters. It was both entertainment and evidence of a cultural shift: In Texas’ strictest English-only schools, students were punished for speaking Spanish through the 1970s; on these stages, Spanish is spoken proudly alongside Elizabethan English poetry. Experimenting with language and plot, these adaptations each hold a conversation with Shakespeare’s original scripts, revising them to tell stories for audiences of 2025.
“It’s my dad. My apá, he…
He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
O al menos ya no como su empleado.”
El Rey del Pollo is a comedy, and it does not purport to match Shakespeare scene for scene. Set among family members running a Mexican restaurant chain, patriarch Reymundo Lear retires from running his fried-chicken empire, and three franchises (rather than sections of the kingdom) stand to be divided among his daughters. But, after failing to give her beloved father the effusive praise he demands, devoted Cordelia is fired instead.
The dialogue is a mix of modern Spanglish (the younger cousins use slang like “TBH,” “gurrrl,” and “bro”) and Shakespeare-isms borrowed from across the plays, not just Lear, that root the play in its dramatic form. The narrator, for instance, adapts the Romeo and Juliet prologue. In other scenes, Shakespeare’s heightened language allows characters to express the big emotions that the stage is a natural home for, often with a telenovela-style twist. When conniving Edmundo, portrayed by Ron Fernandez, schemes to take his more qualified brother’s job with the exaggerated gestures of an anime villain, the humor is in the contrast between his intensity and the absurdity of his dream to bring cashew-based queso to the menu.
The play is slightly experimental: There’s presentational doubling of roles and tongue-in-cheek fourth-wall breaks in which characters acknowledge the paucity of the scenic budget. But it’s also apparent that Vargas has a bone to pick with Shakespeare: Cordelia makes a girl-power defense of her role here, whereas in King Lear, she has much less stage time.
Ultimately, compared with Shakespeare’s, Vargas’ play is centered more tightly on family. A heart-to-heart that Cordelia shares with her cousin Edgardo motivates her to repair the relationship with her father. At the same time, Vargas reins in the cruelty enough that reconciliation is possible. Her plot twists reduce barbaric violence to mean-spirited humiliations that tear at the pride of the older generation. This pride is the theme from King Lear that Vargas draws out to greatest effect, creating in Reymundo a believable mix of love and machismo.
While it’s still “sharper than la chupacabra’s tooth” to have a thankless child, compromise wins the day.
“Her name is Katerina Minola, renown’d en la frontera for her wild tongue.”
While Vargas plays fast and loose with the structure and dialogue of Lear in her adaptation, Shakespeare Dallas partnered with Play On Shakespeare, an organization that commissions modern-language versions of Shakespeare plays, for a reimagined, bilingual production of The Taming of the Shrew by Pulitzer Prize finalist Amy Freed. Freed is also the author of an original play titled Shrew!, but for this version, Freed has, supposedly, merely clarified the staid verse of Shakespeare so that it hits our modern ears the way it did audiences in Shakespeare’s day.
Under Ryan Matthieu Smith’s direction, the play’s setting moves to 1880s San Antonio. The use of Spanish reflects this milieu, the backgrounds of the performers, and the linguistic diversity of Dallas audiences.
Freed’s text is marketed as a “translation” of The Taming of the Shrew into modern verse, rather than an adaptation, indicating that it stays close to the text (although Shakespeare’s “induction” is, per usual, cut). In practice, Freed and Spanish translator Virginia Grise’s script makes it screamingly obvious to the modern ear that this is a sex comedy, inserting double entendres with words like “erect” and “shaft” and not just in places where Shakespeare’s dirty jokes are now obscure. Petruchio’s line “O, how I long to have some chat with her!” for instance, becomes “Oh, I long to have some intercourse with her!”
As performed by Liz Magallanes as Kate and Omar Padilla as Petruchio, the central pair’s first meeting sizzles with chemistry and wit. As the two fly at each other in highly physical performances, Kate ends up straddling the man she meant to insult.
Kate and Petruchio’s punning scenes are largely in English, but when suitors visit Kate’s sister, Bianca, in disguise to woo her, they speak in Spanish. The language is modern enough that Bianca compares her situation to a “telenovela.” (While set in the 1880s, the production has some flexibility with time; in a weird sequence immediately after intermission, there’s a dance party involving an Aztec and a modern break dancer.) In theory, the modernized English helps the modern Spanish slide in more smoothly, but some of the changes modernize the script just for the sake of doing so, resulting in clunky Yoda-speak. Baptista’s line “Señor, perdóname if to the chase I cut,” for instance, has been adapted from Shakespeare’s perfectly clear “Sir, pardon me in what I have to say.”
In a bustling opening scene, Kate comes out in red boots, cracking a whip (a reversal of the traditional use of this prop by Petruchio), and dismisses the suitors hanging around for her sister, who are too old to be attractive options. Against the backdrop of patriarchal 1880s Texas, Kate’s indomitable spirit makes her both a believable frontier character and “shrewish” compared with her sister, whose demure personality is more in line with gender expectations. In this version, the character Baptista is Kate’s mother, not father. With this strong woman at the helm of the family, it’s easy to see where Kate gets her independence.
The play is billed as a satire in which the two smartest people in town come together to tame the society that surrounds them, but since the source material is Shakespeare’s most controversial comedy, and Freed’s commission involved using as light a touch as possible, the plot points that make the original play challenging remain unresolved. Quick-witted Petruchio marries the acerbic Kate and deprives her of food and sleep until she plays along with his jokes.This treatment is supposedly a taste of her own medicine that shows the two are evenly matched, but to achieve a happy ending with Kate and Petruchio together, modern productions have to find ways to get past the cruelty and signal Kate’s self-possession and marital happiness at the end.
Here, as both performers are so likable, even after Petruchio shows up to the wedding late and in a crazy outfit involving a pink sombrero, it’s easy to root for him and Kate to buck convention together. It gets harder as Kate’s taming seems to come through her gradual exhaustion. Afterward, when she and Petruchio find their playful sides together, they’re a great pair, two against the world.
In Kate’s final speech, Petruchio puts his hand under Kate’s foot, while she sermonizes about her willingness to perform that gesture of submission toward him. The words don’t match the action, subverting the script. But is it enough? The play ends as a disconcertingly fun parable about give-and-take in relationships and the slipperiness of the roles we play within them. But there’s still a problem at the center: The ends don’t justify Petruchio’s means.
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