Tenpins Aloft, Forsooth

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When it comes to Shakespeare, reinterpretation may be the sincerest form of flattery. Challenged by the texts and intimidated by their production history, directors seem unable to mount the Bard's work without finding, or imposing, new meanings. For sheer chutzpah -- and fun -- it would be tough to top the vaudeville The Comedy of Errors that opened last week at New York City's Lincoln Center after playing at Chicago's Goodman Theater in 1983 and the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. In this madcap vision of ancient Ephesus, everyone must learn to juggle or die.

The stage is chockablock with tenpins aloft, batons atwirl, trapeze and low- wire acts, fire eating and belly dancing, pratfalls, cartwheels and unicycling. Somewhere amid all this are the rudiments of Shakespeare's farcical plot about twin brothers and their twin servants and even a modicum of his language, although not without elaborate nose thumbing at his low and labored puns.

Director Robert Woodruff shares the staging credit with his performers, notably the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a quintet of juggling comics who play the servants, the masters and Shakespeare himself, looking on in mounting disbelief. Nobody here is precisely acting, but Karla Burns as a lovestruck maid, Randy Nelson as a sly servant, Howard Jay Patterson as one of the masters and Sophie Hayden as his wife all appear to have -- and give -- a roaring good time. -- W.A.H. III