SANTA CRUZ >> UC Santa Cruz and William Shakespeare go hand in hand. From 1981 to 2013, the college hosted multiple plays by the Bard each summer as part of the Shakespeare Santa Cruz festival, until losing the financial support of the institution. The result was the launch of the nonprofit Santa Cruz Shakespeare in 2014, which has continued the tradition of putting on local productions of Shakespeare’s works, this time in DeLaveaga Park.

However, the Bard has not disappeared from the UC Santa Cruz campus, as evidenced by the Performance, Play and Design Department’s production of “The Comedy of Errors,” which opens Friday.

Director Patty Gallagher said Santa Cruz has a strong relationship with the play, which was performed four times by Shakespeare Santa Cruz between 1988 and 2011, and was performed by Santa Cruz Shakespeare in 2019 in which Gallagher played twin servants, Dromia of Syracuse and Dromia of Ephesus, the female version of Shakespeare’s Dromio.

“It was a really fun show and great to do,” she said.

Gallagher has directed a few of the Bard’s plays for the university’s “Shakespeare to Go” programs, which adapted the playwright’s works into 50-minute productions, but this is her first time directing a Shakespearean comedy. Going from acting in “The Comedy of Errors” to directing it has been a joy for Gallagher.

“My students are so brilliant, and I found a cohort of creative, innovative, really gutsy players,” she said. “It’s beautiful to set them in motion and watch them rise to this challenge.”

“The Comedy of Errors” is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. Premiering around 1592 as an adaptation of Latin playwright Plautus’ “Menaechmi,” “The Comedy of Errors” tells the story of two sets of twins accidentally separated at birth and living in different places. One twin, Antipholus, is living in the Sicilian city of Syracuse with his slave, Dromio (the twin from the other family), and once they learn they have identical twins living in the Greek city of Ephesus with the same names as them, they set out to find them. Cases of mistaken identity, as well as slapstick and puns, ensue.

In addition to its comedy, Gallagher said the play has “a real human heart at the center of it.”

“Watching these actors bring their most heartfelt performances to this story of a separated family, I like that they’re firing on all cylinders,” she said. “They’re using their clown muscles and their comedy muscles, but really it’s actually an exercise in empathy and love. When you get down to it, this is a story about love and loss.”

Because Gallagher is directing in a large space, she wanted to shrink the stage.

“I thought, ‘What if we created a little jewel box of a theater?’” she said. “Then I thought about a movie theater frame.”

Gallagher’s mind then went to the silent comedies of the 1920s, something she is very well-versed in, so she gave the film a silent film aesthetic evoking the works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

“What we have found is that frame really holds Shakespeare’s story pretty beautifully,” she said. “It allows us to use live music and some Foley work. It’s been really creative coming together.”UC Santa Cruz’s production also follows suit with Gallagher’s 2019 performance and recasts the pairs of twins as women, an inverse from Shakespeare’s day where all roles were played by men. While “The Comedy of Errors” is largely the same story-wise, Gallagher said the cast puts a new spin on it that will allow audiences to see it in a new way.

“I’ve seen the show so many times as an audience member,” she said. “I’ve been in the show so many times as a maker, but these actors are making me hear things I’ve never heard before. These actors are making me interpret characters in ways I’ve never imagined before, so I found it very new and fresh and innovative because of the work of my actors.”

Gallagher is also happy with the technical crew, including scene painter Pamela Rodriguez-Montero, fight director Dave Maier and late set designer David Cuthbert, who died Tuesday following a stroke. Cuthbert, also a professor of design, did set designs for many local, national and international productions, including the Tony Award-winning “700 Sundays.”

“His last creative act was to build his beloved students a beautiful playground,” Gallagher said of Cuthbert. “He is in our hearts every minute we stand in it.”

The same is true of the rest of the design team, said Gallagher.

“The design team is helping us pull together something very, very beautiful,” she said. “They’ve given us this amazing playground to move around in and to explore, and it’s really opened up the life of the show.”

Gallagher said audiences will be interested in how the comedic archetypes utilized in “The Comedy of Errors” are still present in modern works of fiction.

“From Plautus, you have a whole line throughout theater history of the same use of those stock characters,” she said. “We have inherited those same narrative plots, those same characters today, so you see a line of influence that goes from Roman comedy and Italian farce to Shakespeare all the way down through many other forms, to silent film and then to the sitcoms and sketch comedy that we see today.”

Gallagher hopes audiences enjoy a play that is funny but also deeply human.

“It reminds us of the preciousness of family loyalty, the urgency of our need for each other,” she said.

“The Comedy of Errors” opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday with subsequent performances this Saturday and Sunday and the following weekend Feb. 20 to 23. Thursday through Saturday shows begin at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday shows begin at 3 p.m. All shows are at UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts Center’s eXperimental Theater, 453 Kerr Road, Santa Cruz. Tickets are pay-what-you-wish between $5 and $20, and can be purchased at UCSC’s Theater Arts Center. In keeping with the show starring twins, those who are twins or are willing to dress like a pair can get two-for-one admission with the EventBrite promo code “TWINS2FOR1” if they attend with their “twin.” For more information, go to EventBrite.com.