A Modern Shakespearean Spin on Sisterhood

As Laura Lapidus’s new play “To Have and To Hold” opens with two sisters shopping for a bridal gown. The older one, who isn’t getting married — ever, she suggests — won’t shut up about her stance. “Matrimony,” she declares at one point, “is an instrument of the patriarchy that capitalizes on the flagrancies of heterosexuality by selling long-term partnership under the guise of celebration in exchange for a woman’s total sovereignty.”The character who speaks these lines is named Kate, and her younger sibling is Bianca. If you’re sniffing a literary parallel here, Ms. Lapidus, who also plays Kate, informs us before the scene is over that these young women were named after the heroine and her sister in “The Taming of the Shrew,” by a mother who wanted to be a professor but apparently succumbed to those patriarchal pressures instead.Ms. Lapidus’s focus in “To Have,” however, is not on Kate’s own eventual submission to those powers but on her relationship with Bianca. There’s a guy involved, named Peter — clearly after Petruchio, the tamer of Shakespeare’s Katherina — but the central love story here is between the sisters, whose close and complicated relationship is examined from a decidedly modern perspective, albeit with references to the Bard’s language sprinkled in.It’s a clever conceit, and the playwright has crafted a concise and thoughtful comedy that’s well served by the three actors — Tedra Millan plays Bianca, and Yuriy Sardarov, known to TV fans for his work on NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” is cast as Peter—under Zoë Adams’s brisk direction. That said, “To Have” can seem contrived at points, and not because of its nods to Elizabethan English, which are quite artful.Kate and Peter meet cute in a grocery store, where Peter admits he has been watching her and begins to ardently pursue her, unfazed by her reluctance. He’s sweet and handsome and, we’ll soon learn, a successful plastic surgeon; Kate wears frumpy clothes and a scowl, and although the latter eventually softens, she continues to goad him as he showers her with affection.Like Petruchio, Peter matches wits, in his fashion, with his love interest while courting her, but there’s little in Ms. Lapidus’s script, or in Mr. Sardarov’s endearing performance, to suggest he would ever turn domineering. He just seems madly infatuated. Perhaps this is intended as a modern twist, but it also reinforces a contemporary trope, that of the wallflower who is more stimulating and ultimately alluring than the prom queen.Kate describes herself as “this weird little over-juiced art girl,” an analysis that’s once self-effacing and boastful: Bianca may be more conventionally feminine, but the suggestion is that Kate’s rejection of such convention makes her more intriguing. While Ms. Lapidus is sharp in the latter-role, a certain self-satisfied quality can seep into her portrait, as a writer and an actress.That’s not to say that Bianca is written off as shallow; she emerges from the start as a smart, self-possessed woman who can put her big sister into place when it’s necessary to so do, and Ms. Millan gives her a quirky edge that complements Ms. Lapidus’s drier sensibility. The scenes focusing on Kate and Bianca can also be quite touching, raising questions about how the bonds we form early in life can inform the ones we develop later. “To Have and To Hold” ends with a remembered exchange that references or paraphrases lines from “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Othello.” “You love nothing in the whole world, so well as me?” Bianca asks Kate, rhetorically. At its best, Ms. Lapidus’s play reminds us how such love can help provide a foundation for everything good that follows.

A Modern Shakespearean Spin on Sisterhood

A Modern Shakespearean Spin on Sisterhood

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