The result of this and other distortions is to throw cold water on the comedy’s main event, the rollicking union-by-fire of Cody Nickell’s Petruchio and Kate Eastwood Norris’s Katherine. It makes little sense, for instance, to turn the father of Katherine and Bianca into their mother — even though Sarah Marshall, as Baptista, gives the evening’s most resonant performance. Would a mother of the Wild West (or wherever the heck Padua and Mantua and Pisa are now located) ransom a daughter as callously as Baptista does? The talents of the amazing Holly Twyford, too, are squandered in the misguided gambit of turning Tranio, servant to Bianca’s suitor, Lucentio (Thomas Keegan), into a woman — and then adding an “As You Like It” twist by having her disguise herself as a man. It’s a joke that goes absolutely nowhere.

Posner has proved himself to be an agile Shakespeare interpreter, as he demonstrated with his revelatory “Measure for Measure” and his thrilling, illusion-packed “Macbeth,” devised in collaboration with magician Teller. One can only assume that in the controversial “Shrew’s” thicket of misogyny and spousal abuse, he encountered subjects he wasn’t comfortable tackling head-on, because this “Shrew’’ is a hodgepodge of concept-laden dodges and sloppy asides.

Set designer Tony Cisek turns the Folger stage into a saloon, in which a character wholly out of Posner’s imagination, the Blind Balladeer (Cliff Eberhardt), strums a guitar and croons twangy tunes of his own composition that comment on the plot. “Life is sad / Life is funny / But when you break it all down / It’s about the money,” he sings, referring to the dowries Baptista dangles in front of the suitors for the comelier younger daughter, Sarah Mollo-Christensen’s far too timid Bianca, and for Katherine. The singer does more to make sense of the plot than do the actors.

When first we meet Norris’s cowpoke Katherine, she gives the impression of being Annie Oakley’s manic-depressive cousin. Dressed in designer Helen Q. Huang’s becoming “Bonanza”- style outfits, Norris enters with a gun strapped to her waist: How a character of her legendarily hair-trigger temper has avoided plugging half the men of Padua is its own mystery. She plops herself down with a bottle of hooch, tears streaming down her face.

Norris, an actress of refinement who can project steely charm, doesn’t seem particularly in her element as a cantankerous tomboy, and, in fact, looks pretty unhappy throughout the evening. An audience has to feel some measure of relish in Katherine’s wrath, as she tries in violent spurts to purge her demons; even the famous scene in which she maliciously binds Bianca is halfhearted. Only in a few pointed moments does a sense of character, and the real possibilities of this “Shrew,” emerge. One of these occurs in Petruchio’s lair, after he’s humiliated his bride through starvation and confounds her expectations by revealing that his roughness is merely a ruse. The look of hopeful relief that crosses Norris’s face feels real.