There’s a scene in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” that suggests why one might still want to produce this messed up play in 2023.

Petruchio (M.L. Roberts) has decided to convince Katarina (Kelly Rogers) to marry him, despite never having met the notoriously nasty “scold,” who hisses in men’s faces like a feral cat, for her money and the thrill of the chase. He’s also inferred, not wrongly, that someone so irascible must really be “lusty.”

So, anticipating her entrance, he lounges as if posing for the cover of a romance novel. When she clomps on, the pair circle each other, each intrigued yet alarmed, checking each other out, sniffing for vulnerabilities. Then the wordplay starts fizzing, and as Kate tries to escape on her bicycle, Petruchio halts her, mounts it, too, and within a heartbeat or two has her in his lap.

Directed by Robynn Rodriguez, the scene reveals Shakespeare at its best: Try as we might to claim dignity and self-control, we humans are but windsocks to the gusts of feeling and impulse. Words puff us up, break us down, metamorphose us.

But then you get to the meat of the show, which opened Friday, July 14, at the Grove at DeLaveaga Park. Now wed and hoping to break his wild mare, Petruchio gaslights Kate until she repeats untruths, such as that the moon shines during the day, only to pull a 180 and tell her she lies about that, too. At the end of the play, after Petruchio wins among three new husbands who place a bet on which wife will follow her spouse’s order the fastest, Kate gives a paean to wifely obedience. Willfulness is unpretty, she says, and docility is “too little payment for so great a debt” as a husband’s protection. After all, because women have soft bodies “unapt to toil and trouble in the world,” their demeanors should match.

In a director’s note, Rodriguez acknowledges that the play is “rife with misogyny,” but adds that our world in 2023 is, too. And what if, she goes on, Shakespeare is being ironic, slyly pointing out the rigidity and cruelty of a world that forces a deviant to conform?

To support that interpretation, neither Roberts’ Petruchio nor Rogers’ Kate delivers the more heinous lines with the cultish fervency of a true believer. When Petruchio shares his plans to deprive Kate of food and sleep till she obeys, Roberts’ eyes are all doleful resignation, as if he’s secretly ashamed to say these things and knows what you think of him, dreading and already mourning what he’s about to do. When Kate submits to arbitrariness and absurdity, Rogers implies that he’s the ridiculous one who needs to be tamed, laughing indulgently and shaking her head, as if she’s in charge. She sprinkles her obedience speech with tonal air quotes, adopting the relieved, lackadaisical air of someone who realizes her past self was a burden to maintain.

But when Kate leaps onto Petruchio’s waist, like a baby clinging to a parent, we’re clearly supposed to applaud, and the feeling isn’t ironic. It’s grisly.

There’s lots of other great stuff in this production. Patty Gallagher as the clown Grumio makes each line into a boxing match against an invisible partner, her pugilistic movements enlivening the text like pinpricks. Yael Jeshion-Nelson, as Kate’s supposedly docile sister, Bianca, reveals the dichotomy between their personalities as false. Every bit as feisty and cunning, she just chooses a different guise to achieve her ends. David Kelly, as Bianca’s doomed suitor Gremio, makes Shakespeare’s text as conversational as if he were a lovelorn barfly spilling his guts one stool over from you.

Still, there’s no escaping how much Rodriguez is directing against the text or how much the text nonetheless asserts its hateful ideology. Art needn’t always champion virtue and punish evil, of course — that would be boring — but there’s a difference between portraying misogyny and perpetuating it. This “Shrew” can only wince its way through, as if everyone on stage wishes they could perform something, anything, else.

达到莉莉Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com