Nevada Shakespeare Company is down to clown. The local theater company, co-founded by the husband-and-wife team of Matthew Morgan and Heidi Brucker Morgan with a few creative collaborators, has leaned into Shakespeare’s tragedies in past years, delivered with modern flourishes: Hamlet set in a trailer park, a Grindhouse-inspired Titus Andronicus. But for this year’s main stage production, the versatile company that also brings you the raunchy Bard-with-booze farce Shotspeare tackles a Shakespeare comedy, The Taming of the Shrew.
Perhaps best known to modern audiences in one of its most recent movie adaptations, 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You, Taming of the Shrew is either misogynistic or a critique of patriarchal ignorance, depending on the Shakespeare scholar you speak with and what kind of day they’re having. But Brucker Morgan—who plays the show’s namesake, um, contrarian spouse—has no intention of allowing Kate to shrink into the proscenium. Deep in rehearsals, she shares 10 spoiler-free previews of what NSF is doing to tame this problematic comedy … and she even encourages Kate to hop on the phone. Best beware her sting.
1. The star is pre-salted. “I’m stepping over from being Boozy Skunkton in Atomic Saloon Show into this role,” Brucker Morgan says, adding with a chuckle, “I was just telling my parents yesterday that I think I’m in my shrew era.”
2. It’s gonna be a rumble. “It’s such a cringey play,” she says. “[Matthew and I] settled on the idea of [Petruchio and Kate] being a husband and wife because in some ways, it elevates the drama, and in other ways, it lets people off the hook a little bit. They go, ‘Well, they’re married, so they can be a little more violent with each other and we’ll accept it.’”
3. The manosphere may get satire-maxxed. “If we were doing this play in 2010 I would have a very different perspective on it, but in 2026 it’s sadly and frighteningly relevant. … I’ve been wondering what was meant to be funny and what was meant to just be a portrayal of how people really thought,” she says of Shrew’s gaslighting and tradwife elements. “I would love to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t really know. So, we choose to put that satirical lens on it.”
4. Relax; it’ll be funny. Brucker Morgan says they took inspiration from the slapstick comedy classic The Play That Goes Wrong. “Unexpected things will happen to drive home that this is a farce. … We have a literal slapstick attached to all the entrances, that actors can use for comedic purposes.”
5. Verisimilitude, for all in tents. “Yes, we’re in a circus tent,” she says of the NSF’s short-run home in Henderson’s Cornerstone Park. “But this time last year, you walked in and you’re in a trailer park. This year, you’re inside a theater. … There’s a fountain that will have an actual water feature, and a typical flats background: ‘This is the house, and this is the painted floor.’ Something you would see in a very traditional production.”
6. But not too much verisimilitude. “I remember walking in [to Hamlet] and being like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s a trailer park, and the floor is dirt.’ I’m glad we’re not playing in dirt this time. That was gross.”
7. New Shakespeareans incoming. Shrew features Michael Duffy, an acrobatic performer who’s worked with Cirque du Soleil and Spiegelworld, but never the Bard. “I love introducing people to Shakespeare who are like, ‘I wouldn’t have thought of auditioning if I didn’t know you guys.’ And he’s killing it so far.”
8. Clowns in full effect. Matt and Heidi are brilliant clowns—you’ve seen them in lots of Strip productions, including Absinthe—and they’ll bring some of that chaos to Shrew. “Matt says, “I want to use a slide table for this scene. … Matt and I both have both experience using that kind of apparatus. And some of the actors who have more of a traditional theater background are like, ‘A what now?’ … Incorporating more of that classic clowning has been really fun.”
9. Kate, just between us girls, what do you really think of Petruchio? “I hate to love him. You know how they say, ‘You love to hate him’? It’s the other way around,” says Kate, grabbing the phone from Brucker Morgan. “I’m never allowed to make my own choices at the end of the day. I really do like him, but when he tells me that he’s agreed with my father that we’re going to get married, he loses me there.”
10. Shrewwill work hard to go down easy. “Matt always tells the Shotspeare cast, ‘For this to work and to have the layers it needs to be as entertaining and funny and at times moving as it needs to be, it has to happen to you. … You can’t push the game onto the audience. The audience must force the game onto you, as a player. When it’s approached that way, it’s more successful as a piece of art.”
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