The secret language of having an arts marriage on and off the stage

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Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay, Ontario theatre's reigning power couple, met 10 years ago in Niagara-on-the-Lake – and have bounced back and forth between the stages of the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival every summer since, in leading roles from Hamlet to Eliza Doolittle.

This season at Stratford, Carlson and Hay are playing Petruchio and Katherina in director Chris Abraham's production of The Taming of the Shrew. They are also celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary this month – twice, in fact. After getting married one Monday at Stratford City Hall in August, 2010, they wed again in a ceremony with family and friends the following Monday in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck caught up with the two festival stars in Stratford, Ont.

Who thought it was a good idea for a real-life couple to act opposite one another in The Taming of the Shrew?

Carlson: I've always wanted to play Petruchio. Always. I thought it would be fun, which was really naive of me. It ended up being the single most difficult thing I've ever worked on.

Deborah Hay: Yeah, it was pretty hard for me too.

Carlson: Technically, there were a couple of plays I've done that were more difficult …

Hay: Like Man and Superman [at the Shaw Festival].

Carlson: Or Hamlet [in Chicago and at the Stratford Festival]. But psychically this one is the wildest.

Was Kate a part you wanted to play too, Deb, independently?

Hay: I thought that it was, but I realized you [Ben] kind of planted it. You always said, "That's a part that you must play." So I started going, "That's a part I must play." I've been brainwashed by you.

Carlson: That's horrible!

Hay: I'm ultimately very pleased to be playing it. But we were both very surprised by the play in rehearsal.

What was it you found so difficult about The Taming of the Shrew?

Carlson: I can't think of another play – including Hamlet, actually – that people have as strong opinions about, from it being a misogynistic piece of shit to it being an underground feminist statement. It makes it a really difficult thing to put on its feet, because everyone in the cast has to be inside the same world.

Hay: The hardest thing for me was feeling at the start, "What are we going to do with Shrew?" I felt a responsibility as a feminist.  Right away, when people found out we were doing this, they'd say to me, "What are you doing with Kate's final speech?" That speech has come to represent the play as a whole, when in fact it's a moment in Kate's life that she's arrived at and will move on from. Really, I think people's problem is not with the play, but the world. The simple fact is the subjection of women to men is still a part of our reality that makes this play –

Carlson: Hot.

Hay: I think Shakespeare wrote a play about two people and this is the story. Petruchio helps Kate learn how to survive within a given set of circumstances. She has only one voice and it's a voice of rage. I think he helps her learn how to surrender and, much to her surprise when she surrenders, she doesn't completely collapse. In fact, she's able to see more and hear more – as we do when we're not in rage. And the world becomes a much richer, more complex place.

And so what is her speech at the end: "Fie, fie, unknit that threat'ning unkind brow/ And dart not scornful glances from those eyes/ To wound thy lord."

Hay: That final speech, for me, is a gift back to Petruchio – and it's a risk. She's saying: You're teaching me how to dance under this umbrella of words, to use irony sometimes, utter sincerity other times. And the parts that are completely ambiguous in that speech, she's saying, "Our love is nobody's business."

Was that a place you arrived at through rehearsals – or did director Chris Abraham have an idea about the show right off the bat?

Carlson: Chris doesn't ever do that really. He's more interested in collaboration than anything else. Yes, he had a central starting position about the play, but he's more interested in what his actors want to bring to it than imposing anything on them.

Hay: I just love the elements that make up Chris as a human. He's ferociously smart – and I don't always find that kind of intelligence and the desire to collaborate go hand in hand.

Carlson: No, that's very true.

Hay: He so believes in the power of collective minds, and that's very exciting.

This idea that Petruchio has given Katherina a gift – why does he have to starve her and sleep-deprive her along the way?

Hay: The amazing thing about Kate is that – who knows if Petruchio even intended it as a gift! – but she's able to alchemize it in the most astounding way. I don't want to make it all, "Oh, he saved her life." I think they save each other, in a way. That's the whole falconer taming the falcon – which I think is a very symbiotic and equal relationship. You never actually tame a falcon – you form an alliance.

Carlson: The bad falconer breaks the spirit of the beast, a good falconer doesn't. And there's always a moment where you let the falcon go. There's all kinds of falconry imagery in the play – when Petruchio lets Kate go and calls her back [before her final speech] and, unlike the other wives in the play, she comes back, Shakespeare's making a direct parallel to falconry.

There are subtle changes to Shakespeare's words in your production. Instead of Petruchio saying, "She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat; last night, she slept not, nor tonight she shall not," he says, "We ate no meat today … we slept not …"

Carlson: It's been done before, but it was my suggestion to change those words here.

Hay: It would have been common knowledge for an Elizabethan audience that [the falconer and falcon] go through that together.

Carlson: When he makes his bird fast, he fasts as well; when he keeps his bird up, he stays awake as well. That's how he gets the bird's trust.

Hay: It's such an amazing play, though, because our friends came on opening night and afterward at the party some were saying, "You were great, but it's so difficult watching her wildness and spirit beat out of her." And others were saying, "That was great how she had all the power at the end."

Did you two have any differences of opinion on the play?

Hay: We thought it'd be like when we played Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado – joyful. Oh, it was hard. These people, they're in us for the duration of the play and, in a small way, they're in us for the duration of the run. Rehearsals were tough. We'd come home and – we didn't have crazy fights or anything, but lots of furrowed brows.

Carlson: We never actually ended up screaming at each other, but we almost ended up screaming at Chris. I kept telling him, "What story are we telling? Because if we're telling a story of a man destroying a woman, I don't want to tell that story."

Hay: It was a trigger for both of us. I didn't want to be so angry that I was unlikeable. And you were scared to seem abusive.

Carlson: Although, arguably he is abusive and arguably she is really angry.

Hay: The play doesn't work without her rage and his level of –

Carlson: Commitment to his endeavour, whatever you want to call it.

Hay: A part of me wanted it to be love at first sight so we can always justify all of it. But Chris wanted to prolong it as long as possible.

Carlson: It's a play that's really easy to look for an answer to – but, in a way, to find an easy answer to the play is to diminish it. It's charged with sexual politics and carries the brunt of the relationship between men and women from the time it was written to now.

Hay: Like the woman I play in the induction [the play's framing device] says at the start, "It is a kind of history."

It does feel as if your Petruchio and Katherina are in love at the end. As human beings who are married and, presumably, in love offstage, how does that love resemble your love?

Hay: It's different, isn't it?

Carlson: Very.

Hay: Our love happens when we get offstage. We come back to ourselves and see each other and go: "Oh wow, it's a real honour to be able to witness you, witness you in these stages of becoming other people."

Carlson: The similarity is that they have a secret language. All successful marriages have a language that nobody else speaks. Kate and Petruchio, by the end of the play, have that.

Hay: And, in a way, that's why it is not a misogynist story. That's why she is not tamed. That secret language is what defends the play.

Carlson: Yeah, I believe that.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

The Taming of the Shrew continues to Oct. 10. stratfordfestival.ca