There’s no getting around it:  Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is a vicious paean to male domination.  It presents us with the spectacle of a husband bending his wife to his will through various forms of torture, and concludes with a long speech extolling the virtues of female submission — delivered by the newly “tamed” wife.  Any director taking the play on is faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of making it morally acceptable to a modern audience.  

The new Theatre for a New Audience production — at The Duke on 42nd Street until April 21st — is an honorable attempt to present it as something other than a series of primitive misogynist rituals.  It’s always thoughtful, superbly acted, and often surprisingly funny, but it doesn’t manage to remove the play’s queasy brutality.

The director, Arin Arbus, makes Kate (Maggie Siff) — the titular shrew — sympathetic from the outset and emphasizes the vileness of everyone around her.  The smug, preening Baptista (Robert Langdon Lloyd), Kate’s father, neglects her and dotes with syrupy affection on her younger sister, Bianca (Kathryn Saffell).  The latter is a spoiled daddy’s girl who uses a front of false innocence to mask her coquettishness.  Her suitors fare no better.  Hortensio (Saxon Palmer) cowers before Kate and writhes with sleaziness around Bianca; Gremio (John Christopher Jones) is a craven, doddering Quasimodo.  Lucentio (Denis Butkus), who eventually wins Bianca’s hand, is often portrayed as a conventional lovesick hero, but Butkus plays him as a loudmouth brat.  His delivery of the famous line “I burn, I pine, I perish!” is more neurotically desperate than romantic.  The updating of the action to the late-19th century American Wild West emphasizes the general air of savagery; clearly, civilization has yet to reach this backwater.

In this context, Kate’s shrewishness makes sense.  It is her coping mechanism for a world that has no use for her.  In her early scenes, Siff emphasizes Kate’s aloneness; a sense of desperation underlies everything she does.  Her tense carriage and wide-eyed glare let us know that fear lies behind her bold words.  She barely holds back tears while scolding her father and Bianca’ suitors.  She is a victim (though not a weakling) before she even meets her tamer (Andy Grotelueschen).

Once Petruchio enters, the misogyny at the heart of the play becomes hard to ignore, and Arbus can’t seem to decide exactly what to do with him.  He’s brutal in one moment, tender in the next.  Grotelueschen’s Petruchio is a shaggy-haired, physically robust ruffian in black boots.  In his first scene, he beats his servant (John Pankow) for making a trivial error — and the thought of his “taming” Kate fills you with dread.   But then, the wooing scene is unexpectedly charming.  Arbus and the actors present it as a battle between equally matched partners instead of taking the obvious approach of lampooning Kate.  After initially dismissing Petruchio, Siff’s Kate seems almost allured by his persistence, as if she has finally met her match.  Both characters seem to be digging the battle as they prowl around the stage like cats about to strike their prey.  The scene becomes overtly erotic when Kate hoists her skirt, races up a ladder, and Petruchio pulls her back down.  At this point, you expect the production to play out as an amusingly kinky sex comedy.

But the wedding scene, in which Petruchio forcibly hauls Kate off after shouting “I will be master of what is mine!” is very ugly, and most of the following act even more so.  It is true that Arbus softens the torture scene by letting Kate have the food Petruchio offers her in scene 3 (the stage directions indicate that he pretends to offer her the food and then tells Hortensio to eat it while her back is turned).  But there is still the protracted humiliation of Kate begging her husband’s servant for food, being denied the clothes she wants — and, of course, Petruchio’s declared intention of starving her into submission.  After all this, Grotelueschen’s tender delivery of the speech beginning “Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor” (in which he explains to Kate that the shabby clothes he is forcing on her don’t demean her as a person) seems unconvincing, and Siff’s eventual submission to him, inexplicable.  When the actors finally kiss in Act 5, they convey a genuine sense of rapport, but how this has been reached is not at all clear.

In the infamous final scene, Siff delivers Kate’s monologue about female submission in an ironic tone, Bianca and Lucentio seem headed for a rocky marriage, and Petruchio throws the money he won in the bet back at the other characters.   All of this suggests that Kate and Petruchio are really kindred spirits who have overcome the sordid milieu that surrounds them.  The scene plays well in isolation, but it hardly banishes memories of those horrific torture scenes that came earlier.  For all its virtues, the production doesn’t manage to rid the Shrew of its meanness.