Taibi Magar, right, directs the cast of 'A Comedy of Errors' at Shakespeare & Company.

LENOX, Mass. -- In terms an Elizabethan would understand, the gauntlet has been thrown down - by the Bard of Avon himself.

 

Taibi Magar, somewhat to her own surprise, came to Shakespeare & Company to pick it up.

 

"He sets up a big challenge for a director," Magar said during a recent pre-rehearsal interview at the Tina Packer Playhouse. "He puts 'Comedy' in the title. It's like, 'A Comedy of Errors.' No hiding.

 

"It's really scary, actually. If you don't make the audience laugh, you have failed completely."

 

The laughter starts on Thursday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m., when Magar's "Comedy" opens for a run that continues through Aug. 23 on Shakespeare & Company's main stage.

 

For her first venture to the Berkshires, the graduate of Brown/Trinity's MFA program has taken the farce of twins and mistaken identities and moved it to a contemporary setting.

 

"My sense of Shakespeare is I only understand it as a contemporary text," Magar said. "I only want to meet it as a new play because I can't understand it in its 16th century-ness. I don't know what it meant to those people. I only know what it means to me now.

 

"And what I think is extraordinary about Shakespeare is that it can apply now."

 

That goes for the eternal truths and, in the right hands, the jokes. Magar said she has assembled a cast that can sell those jokes to a contemporary audience.

 

Two actors, Aaron Bartz and Ian Lassiter, play dual roles, portraying the two sets of twins separated in infancy. Both, like Magar herself, are making their first appearance at the South County venue.

 

"I am so excited simply to give the gift of these actors to this audience," she said. "We are having such a blast in rehearsal. I think every single rehearsal, at some point, we're laughing so hard that we're crying.

 

To keep "Comedy" fresh, Magar has added some creative staging elements and plenty of music, enlisting the help of choreographer Jesse Perez, whose work she has admired for years, Magar said.

 

"It's slapstick, physical comedy, this play," she said. "So the physicality is very important, and dance feels like a very playful way into that -- to mine the joyful energy that is inside the text into our bodies and our breath. That's been a real joy.

 

"And we have a couple of singing moments because it's fun."

 

Magar brings a background in Shakespeare, having studied with Barry Edlestein at the Public Theater in lower Manhattan.

 

"He wrote this great book called 'Thinking Shakespeare,' which changed my life," she said. "I suddenly was able to access the text in a way I had not before. At the time, he was the head of the Shakespeare initiative at the Public, and he ran something called the Public Theater Shakespeare Lab.

 

"I was one of the directing fellows, so I got to spend the whole summer with him. It really blew my mind and opened things up in a crazy, beautiful way."

 

For her first foray into the Shakespeare canon, Magar picked "Hamlet," a choice she laughs about now.

 

"Why not start with the hardest one, I guess," she joked. "I'm such an idiot."

 

Later, she directed "The Winter's Tale" at Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I. But it was her work on a Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of our Teeth" that led to her Lenox.

 

"Rick Dildine, who was the artistic director earlier this year, saw my thesis production [at Brown/Trinity]," Magar said. "So when he was putting his season together, he gave me a call and said, 'Why don't you come up and let's talk about "A Comedy of Errors"?' ... I guess he liked what I said."

 

And Magar liked the idea of helming the show, even though she never saw herself as a comedic director.

 

"Almost everything I've done since then has been a comedy," she said. "And I'm not a comedy director. I'm actually like a very tragic person. I want to do 'King Lear.'

 

"I think what so so successful about 'Skin of our Teeth' was I was able to mine some of the comedy."

 

And in "Comedy," she can mine the heart -- within reason.

 

"With this play, you can't get too serious because you'll never get it back," Magar said. "And he's not being serious. He's being playful with all these arguments and ideas.

 

"But what I do think -- and the thing I discovered going back to the play because I hated this play when I first read it, but I was very young -- is that i'ts not one of those emotionally wrenching plays, but it is a reunion play. I think what I found when I read it, which is why I fell in love with it and decided to pitch it, is that it is about a family that's very disparate at the beginning. They've been torn apart by this shipwreck.

 

"And the play, with all it's silliness and ridiculousness is about this family coming together."

 

That speaks to the universality and timelessness that draws Magar to all of Shakespeare's work.

 

"It really is about family and the importance of family," she said. "It's crazy that this playwright who was writing 500 years ago is after the same things we are. He wants us to laugh at ourselves and to celebrate love."

 

For more about Shakespeare & Company's season or to order tickets, visit www.shakespeare.org.