Fiasco and the Saunders Collective Shake Up “The Comedy of Errors”
Real-life twins Claire Saunders and Alanna Saunders play the identical Dromios in Fiasco Theater’s Without a Net workshop production of The Comedy of Errors. Photo: Toby Tenenbaum.
If one were to assemble a new and tantalizing version of The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s early farce involving two pairs of identical twins, might the production incorporate … actual identical twins?
Well, that’s just what the folks at Fiasco Theater have come up with. In something of a casting coup, the 16-year-old Off-Broadway company has recruited four acting siblings, Broadway vets all and all in their 30s, to play the two sets of twins in this madcap play of merry mix-ups. What’s more, two of those four, Claire and Alanna Saunders, are indeed identical twins.
Their older, non-twin siblings Heath and Trent—with whom they have formed a company of their own, the Saunders Collective—play the two lordly brothers, both named Antipholus, while the sisters take on the servile twins, each named Dromio. (One Antipholus and Dromio pair is from Syracuse, the other from Ephesus; the pairs were separated shortly after birth in a shipwreck.)
The result is another permutation of innovative theater-making for Fiasco, a group that prides itself on finding sharp, accessible frameworks for the texts of Shakespeare and other writers.
“We’re looking for ways, strategically and artistically, to grow,” said Ben Steinfeld, a Fiasco founder and one of its three artistic directors, and the production’s director. “One of those things involves opening up our collaborative circle to include new partners, other people who also have a way of working that we’re interested in and curious about.”
That impulse led Fiasco to a studio in the Houghton Hall Arts Community on East 30th Street in Manhattan, where on November 16 its Comedy of Errors finished a sold-out, five-performance run. The casual-yet-disciplined presentation—part of Fiasco’s Without a Net initiative—is the precursor to a lengthier engagement starting in March 2026 at the Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, Fiasco’s co-producer on the project.
Without a Net, a signature Fiasco invention, allows the company to see a show up on its feet, with an audience, early in the development process: in this instance, the 10-member cast and a pianist had only 12 days of rehearsal. The event might be called a workshop-plus: the scenes were fully staged, with a few props and set pieces (the production also features original songs by Heath Saunders). And actors not yet comfortably conversant with their roles had the option of holding onto their scripts.
“We were finding that doing readings for audiences wasn’t giving us enough information about how might we do this show,” said Jessie Austrian, who plays Adriana in Errors and is another of Fiasco’s founding co-artistic directors. (Noah Brody is the third.) “This idea became Without a Net. It takes pretty significant resources to put everybody on contract for two weeks with some props and some music. It gives us, really, two weeks of rehearsal.”
Fiasco Theater’s Without a Net initiative allows the company to stage a show while still very early in its development. Photo: Toby Tenenbaum.
In the Houghton Hall space on one of those rehearsal days in early November, the Without a Net process unfolded. Steinfeld stood in the middle of the studio, working out a bit with a door on wheels—doors being classic conveyances for farce—for Trent and Alanna, playing Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, who have just arrived in Ephesus.
“You’ve got to go two laps around,” Steinfeld said, as Alanna circled the door at a significant clip. “That’ll totally work,” he added. “Let’s do it again.”
Minutes later, Steinfeld supervised the blocking of another scene, with Alanna and Claire crouching on either side of the door, duplicating each other’s gestures. Distilling Shakespeare’s dizzy notion of blurred identity achieved apotheosis: an observer really could not tell which Dromio was which.
For the sisters, there are what you might call biological shortcuts to the assignment. “I think that there is certainly an innate thing that is happening,” Claire said in a joint interview with Alanna, “which is that we don’t have to try at all in the visual experience of these characters.”
“We needed something between a 29-hour workshop on music stands and an incredibly expensive full production,” the director Ben Steinfeld said, adding that Fiasco wants to “let you join us in the moment and help us figure things out.”
That physical advantage, Alanna added, frees her up to focus more rigorously on the emotional life of her Dromio. “It’s actually nice in this production,” she said. “All we have to do is worry about how our individual Dromios make sense. And the rest of it takes care of itself.”
It was the casting of Alanna in Fiasco’s national tour of Into the Woods several years ago that drew the Saunders Collective into Fiasco’s orbit. Subsequently, the siblings developed a cabaret act, which they performed at Manhattan’s 54 Below and which Austrian and Brody attended.
“To hear them, the four of them, sing together, to watch them play together, was just incredible,” Austrian said. “I leaned over to Noah and said, ‘We should look at The Comedy of Errors with the Saunderses.’”
Alanna and her four siblings grew up—the fifth, Blake, is a teacher—in Kirkland, Washington, outside Seattle. Their parents were musicians (their mother Kim was also a Microsoft executive), and music was the children’s gateway to the pursuit of musical theater. “Once we started that journey, by the time the girls graduated from high school, amongst all of them, they had been in 77 musicals,” Kim Saunders recalled.
Without a Net gave Heath Saunders a chance to employ their skills as a songwriter. In tuneful numbers such as “For the Record 2/O, What a Day,” the actors home in on the ideas of role playing and self-definition, as well as the notions of family, that reverberate throughout the piece.
Trent Saunders as Antipholus of Syracuse in the sold-out, five-performance run of The Comedy of Errors at Houghton Hall. Photo: Toby Tenenbaum.
“That’s part of the reason that Comedy of Errors is so fun,” Heath said, in a separate Zoom interview, with Trent. “It’s because we have a really unique insight into what this is, which is being born together and then sort of separating, and then coming back together and finding each other through a bunch of hijinks and miscommunications.”
Trent added that the play’s themes resonate in the creative lives of the Saunders Collective: they’ve written a pilot for themselves called The Sheridans: “It’s a TV show about a family of child stars,” Trent explained, “who starred in a children’s PBS animal extravaganza and who all grew up, and you are tracking them in their individual journeys in New York.”
For the time being, though, Shakespeare is their focus. At one of the official Houghton Hall performances, Steinfeld welcomed several dozen audience members, seated on folding chairs on opposite sides of the studio performance space, for Fiasco’s 90-minute adaptation. Colorful fabrics hung like awnings around the room’s perimeter, suggesting, perhaps, a Mediterranean market square.
“We needed something between a 29-hour workshop on music stands and an incredibly expensive full production,” the director said, adding that Fiasco wants to “let you join us in the moment and help us figure things out.”
Afterward, Steinfeld said that’s exactly what occurred. “We made a lot of important progress,” he said. The next step will be that full production—lighting, a set, a band, the whole shebang. And the plan after Louisville? “To do it,” Steinfeld said, “everywhere.”