The Comedy of Errors

The laugh track starts early and never stops. Shakespeare's shortest and most aggressively funny play dumps two pairs of identical twins into the same city, and the resulting chaos is breathtaking in its stupidity and brilliance. Antipholus of Syracuse arrives in Ephesus with his servant Dromio, completely unaware that his exact double lives there with his own Dromio. What follows is a cascade of wrong-person beatings, false accusations of theft, a near-seduction, an arrest, and demands for exorcism. But beneath the slapstick fury sits something genuinely moving: a father sentenced to death for simply trying to find his lost family, two sets of twins who spent their lives separated, and the question of what identity even means when anyone can be mistaken for their mirror image. Shakespeare builds a comedy machine out of confusion itself, and it roars to life.