‘The Three Cuckolds’ @ Hip Pocket Theatre

Season art by Lake Simons; photography by Dakota Foster

—Ryan Maffei

Open your program for Hip Pocket Theatre’s 50th anniversary production of commedia dell’arte-style The Three Cuckolds, a Leon Katz adaptation that in 1976 served as the beloved theatre company’s inaugural effort. You’ll find a director’s note from Undermain artistic associate and Hip Pocket mainstay Christina Cranshaw, meant to sift some significance out of the material at hand for us.

“What happens when desire takes control of our carnal desires?” goes the first sentence, isolated from the next paragraph for dramatic effect. I’ll skip trying to answer that.

Director Cranshaw is a voraciously cultured, inexhaustibly passionate, reliably idiosyncratic artist. At her best, she’s a visionary. She is also an absolute lunatic. You can feel the latter’s hand throughout this production, a firehose spray of manic absurdity. The immoderately zany tone amplifies the usual commedia tropes, everything turned up to 11 if not 17. This is also the most aggressively horny show you will see this season if not year. Yes, The Three Cuckolds is what happens when desire does take total control of our carnal desires – or when carnality overtakes the commedia dell’arte stew.

No ten-second passage goes unfurnished with a thrust or gyration, a quenchless stare, a familiar (or educational) depiction of some technique, a lasciviousn and/or lubriciou look, plus some flying sex toys. The audience for last Sunday’s performance was agape or gleefully engaged, with a few enthusiastic participants roped in. I wondered at times about the, you know, point of all this – are we mocking sex, or celebrating it, or both? As with every other element of commedia, a degree of distance from reality is the charge powering the clockwork.

However clear Cranshaw herself is on exactly what she’s trying to say, her trademark strengths abound in this show. It’s magnificently cast; never takes a breath; brims with enough electricity to drown out the stars shining abnormally bright over the idyllic scenery in which this jewel of a theatre hides “out west” on the edge of Fort Worth. You can easily sniff out the mark she’s left on a group of wildly inspired performances. As words are lost in manic deliveries and drowned out by literal crickets, the show makes it as clear as the director’s note that words are not the point here – the madness is, plus the method behind it.

Cranshaw’s mind is especially discernible in the show’s most captivating performance, an absolute tour-de-force effort by Madi Rose Duren. With her goofy, childlike wit and cat-in-heat energy, at times Duren’s work feels like it might match her director’s own take beat for beat. But everything she tries (and she has a fresh idea for every sentence) hits a bullseye. When The Three Cuckolds is not as funny or sexy or cohesive as it hopes it is, Duren darts through the action, invisibly weaving it all together. It is worth the drive, a picturesque one if you’ve never taken the trip, to watch her.

Still, every other actor provides their own brand of full-tilt commitment and madcap intensity. Let’s take the cuckolds, the familiar trio of Coviello, Pantalone and Zanni. Deeply intelligent, but often cast in roles that exploit a gift for blankness, Cameron Martinez’s talent is liberated here; he’s endlessly delightful as the mincing Coviello. J.C. Roggenbuck does the show’s least coherent character work (a feat) as Pantalone, whose grotesquerie transcends even his mask. He has a gift for drooling that rivals Bill Skarsgård’s in the It movies. Paul Heyduck is Hip Pocket’s specialist in all styles, utterly transformed as the hobbled old clown Zanni. Their collective chemistry sizzles.

Isolated from the bros down in the round space (or up in chambers amid the audience), the wives are the real heroes. And here it must be said that whether or not Cranshaw (or Katz) is saying anything very interesting or new about sex, this is hardly a regressive show. The men are self-defeating fools, the women get theirs no matter whose rings they wear, and the femme inside the dude at the center of the chaos – Duren as Arlecchino – plays for every team. Claire Parry as Franceschina is incisive and insatiable, Andra Laine Hunter mines what I assume is her natural drawl for every available laugh, and Will Frederick, fiercely decked out as Flaminia, is the hardest working woman in show business whenever he sallies down the aisles.

There’s also the Devil, because why not, brought to life and beyond by Julian Harris, whose work only falls behind Duren’s as the best in show. His emergence is gloriously elevated by a giant puppet, designed by Zella Hays. In tandem with tech direction by Lee Neisler, lighting design by Nikki DeShea Smith (board operation by Obrey Minor II), scenic design by Allen Dean, costume design by Susan Austin (plus wardrobe supervision by Tommy Buckner), props design by Ezra Steward and Trevor Truong, and mask design by Alice Nelson, Cuckolds is a visual spectacle that seems a great deal less minimalist then it actually is, a testament to the collective vision here.

Harper Caroline Lee, per tradition, takes on everything everywhere all at once, stage managing from a chair up in the corner as her intimacy choreography unfolds like a Bosch triptych below. (Hays is her ASM). And on the famous stage’s second story, the dream team of Chris Allen Curtis and Gigi Cervantes man guitar and cheap keyboard respectively, offering a whimsical soundtrack and ace sound effects. One of them operates a slide whistle, expertly deployed, and their sound design doesn’t skip the kitchen sink, including a Madonna sample I’m assuming nobody paid for.

That in itself is one of many anarchic little bits that make this show a harder-hitting hoot than a theatre priding itself on iconoclasm usually endeavors these days. But Christina Cranshaw doesn’t do half measures, and it’s nice to see Hip Pocket Theatre embracing this, though it’s not as if the material is carrying a provocative message.

Still, if an institution that has long boasted countercultural bonafides is to foreground nostalgia and theatrical traditionalism, this is how it ought to come – with no holds barred and every button pushed. The Three Cuckolds might not satisfy you with epiphanies or spiritual enlightenment. But you won’t leave feeling betrayed. Huzzah for the Hipsters’ Year 50!

WHEN: June 12-28, 2026
WHERE: HPT, 1950 Silver Creek Rd., Fort Worth
WEB: hippocket.org