Kasey Kenyon has a repertoire of goggle-eyed masks of surprise the way Eskimos have a vocabulary for different kinds of snow. This, it turns out, is fortunate. This is a farce with lots of characters, each one a precisely placed cog in the plot’s machinery. How does the actor keep who’s who and what’s what as straight as possible? “Reading through the play,” he says. “Reading through the play…numerous times.” Which makes sense. In Shakespeare, almost all of an actor’s questions can be answered by the text. “Who am I?”, “What do I?”, “Which one is that one and who do I think she is, again?” He’s playing a character searching for a family lost, and there are some that’ve lept through all sorts of hoops to achieve that. It’s just this time it’s funny. His character, Antipholus of Syracuse, spends most of the play hurtling from one surprising encounter to another, either pampered by strangers for no discernible reason, or chased by people he takes for witches and sorcerers. The island of Ephesus, it appears, has been infested by magical madmen, and he simply wants to find his long-lost family, then leave. Happily for us, his journey is anything but simple.

– Nate Beynon